Quantifying COVID-19 transmission risks based on human mobility data: A personalized PageRank approach for efficient contact-tracing

Given its wide-ranging and long-lasting impacts, COVID-19, especially its spatial spreading dynamics has received much attention. Knowledge of such dynamics helps public health professionals and city managers devise and deploy efficient contact-tracing and treatment measures. However, most existing studies focus on aggregate mobility flows and have rarely exploited the widely available disaggregate-level human mobility data. In this paper, we propose a Personalized PageRank (PPR) method to estimate COVID-19 transmission risks based on a bipartite network of people and locations. The method incorporates both mobility patterns of individuals and their spatiotemporal interactions. To validate the applicability and relevance of the proposed method, we examine the interplay between the spread of COVID-19 cases and intra-city mobility patterns in a small synthetic network and a real-world mobility network from Hong Kong, China based on transit smart card data. We compare the recall (sensitivity), accuracy, and Spearmans correlation coefficient between the estimated transmission risks and number of actual cases based on various mass tracing and testing strategies, including PPR-based, PageRank (PR)-based, location-based, route-based, and base case (no strategy). The results show that the PPR-based method achieves the highest efficiency, accuracy, and Spearmans correlation coefficient with the actual case number. This demonstrates the value of PPR for transmission risk estimation and the importance of incorporating individual mobility patterns for efficient contact-tracing and testing.