Crowding can also result from socioeconomic conditions that force many people to live in a small space or from cultural preferences for living in multigenerational households. Sometimes crowding occurs when people gather for events such as concerts or parties, notes Ann Forsyth, an urban planner at Harvard University. “Most often when people talk about density and COVID-19, they’re really talking about crowding,” says Shima Hamidi, an assistant professor of environmental health and engineering at Johns Hopkins University. “And from the beginning, these struck me as the wrong questions to ask.”įor one thing, the population density of a city or county does not capture the finer points of how people actually gather within smaller spaces, such as those on college campuses or in individual residential buildings. virus,” says Deepti Adlakha, an environmental health researcher at Queen’s University Belfast. “Since the early days of the pandemic, there have been a number of articles speculating whether COVID-19 will spell the end of cities, some articles suggested that COVID-19 was spurring an exodus from cities to suburbs as a way to escape the. And studies conducted amid the pandemic suggest that other factors-connections among communities, access to health care and crowding within a small area, for example-can also strongly influence how the disease spreads and how residents fare. They note the examples of high-density cities, including Hong Kong, Seoul and Taipei, where robust and widespread interventions (such as social distancing, mask wearing and contact tracing) successfully limited COVID-19 cases and deaths. Many public health and urban planning researchers agree that the concentration of people within a certain area does not tell the whole story. But simple density has not adequately predicted the disease’s course in the U.S., where the new coronavirus has spread well beyond urban areas to ravage rural communities and suburbs during the country’s long summer. leaders and pundits pointed to hard-hit cities such as New York, Milan and Wuhan as proof that population density was to blame for coronavirus hotspots. The black line shows the percentage of counties (or votes) won by the democratic candidate (Joe Biden) in each of those bins.In the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, some U.S. You can toggle the graph to show the number of counties won by each candidate or the number of votes won in each of the population density bins. Note that they are on a log scale as well. This second graph is a histogram that specifically categorizes counties into discreet bins by population density. The densest counties favored Biden quite heavily as he won 45 of the 50 densest counties in the country, which also tend to have a fairly high population. the Borough of Staten Island) is the densest county (17th densest) in the country that Trump won. There are also several counties with population density below 1 person per square mile (several in Alaska because of the size of their counties) but these are excluded from the graph. This is done because there is one to two orders of magnitude difference in the densest counties (in New York City) and even moderately dense counties. Population density is calculated as people per square mile in the county and is shown in the graph on a log scale, where each major grid line is 10 time greater than the previous one. Vote margin is the percentage amount that one candidate beat the other candidate by in the county (0% means a tie while 50% means that one candidate got 75% and the other got 25% of the voteshare).

It’s clear there is a very strong correlation between the vote margin and population density. Hover over (or click on) the bubbles to see information about the county. This raised the question of exactly how population density correlates with election results. As the counties were represented by population, it was clear that democratic-leaning areas on that map tended to grow in size, while republican-leaning areas tended to shrink. The visualization I made about county election results and comparing land area to population size was very popular around the time of the 2020 presidential election.

How do 2020 presidential election results correlate with population density?