Social vulnerability amplifies the disparate impact of mobility on COVID-19 transmissibility across the United States

Abstract Although human mobility is considered critical for the spread of the new coronavirus disease (COVID-19) both locally and globally, the extent to which such an association is impacted by social vulnerability remains unclear. Here, using multisource epidemiological and socioeconomic data of US counties, we develop a COVID-19 pandemic vulnerability index (CPVI) to quantify their levels of social vulnerability and examine how social vulnerability moderated the influence of mobility on disease transmissibility (represented by the effective reproduction number, R t) during the US summer epidemic wave of 2020. We find that counties in the top CPVI quintile suffered almost double in regard to COVID-19 transmission (45.02% days with an R t higher than 1) from mobility, particularly intracounty mobility, compared to counties in the lowest quintile (21.90%). In contrast, counties in the bottom CPVI quintile were only slightly affected by the level of mobility. As such, a 25% intracounty mobility change was associated with a 15.28% R t change for counties in the top CPVI quintile, which is eight times the 1.81% R t change for those in the lowest quintile. These findings suggest the need to account for the vulnerability of communities when making social distancing measures against mobility in the future.