RAPID: American Infrastructure and Service Work in the Era of COVID-19 Transmission

冠状病毒(新冠肺炎)的传播使我们国家基础设施体系中的差距得到了鲜明的体现。基础设施提供的所有社会和经济利益--例如接近商品、服务和彼此--在大流行时期变成了负担。增强我们物理连接的系统也让社交距离变得更加困难。这项提案的目的是描述这些基础设施差距如何影响新冠肺炎的传播，以及谁因此最容易受到影响。先前的研究认为，密度和物理上的接近对积极的社会和经济成果至关重要。这些研究还认为，有形基础设施对健康结果很重要，即更快地获得关键医疗和紧急服务。然而，冠状病毒使身体更接近成为一种负担，因为它使参与社交距离变得更加困难。这项建议的贡献是理解和描述冠状病毒在我们的物理基础设施系统中突出的这种紧张关系。通过确定密集和邻近的有形基础设施的“热点”，我们可以更好地针对我国在脆弱地区有限的测试能力，希望保持有形基础设施的好处，同时也减轻其在面对大流行时观察到的不利影响。先前的研究表明，技术之所以会产生不平等，是因为它“偏重技能”。然而，冠状病毒大流行揭示了一种不同的可能机制。在这种情况下，个人可能拥有类似的技能，但在获取数字基础设施方面存在差异。这项提议旨在评估这一替代机制，希望以我们有限的经济刺激资源为目标，减轻该流行病最脆弱者的经济负担。该项目将利用人口、经济和基础设施数据，并采用空间扩散和差异模型。特别是，这项工作将汇总来自疾控中心、联邦、州和地方卫生机构以及约翰霍普金斯大学等学术机构的新冠肺炎和医疗保健利用数据，并将其与北卡罗来纳州商务部的国家桥梁库存、联邦通信委员会、季度就业和工资普查、国家历史地理信息系统和O*Net的数据进行比较。这项工作将两种类型的基础设施--物理基础设施和数字基础设施--配对，以考察这种基础设施的建设和可用性如何影响城市，无论是在健康方面还是在个人经济繁荣方面。这项工作是新颖的，因为它使有形基础设施成为疾病传播的贡献者和抗击疾病的机制，并将评估流行病如何由于不平等地获得数字基础设施而造成工资不平等，即使在拥有类似技能的个人之间也是如此。这项研究提供了一种相对快捷的方法来利用物理和数字基础设施的变化来a)确定那些最需要目前可用资金和非常有限的资金的社区，以及b)制定快速反应和部署战略，以帮助国家减缓病毒的传播和未来的经济影响。这项工作将对整个社会产生影响，但特别针对服务不足的人群和那些可能无法轻松利用数字基础设施的低工资行业。所有使用的数据都是公开的，PI将在CMU网站上提供代码。此外，该项目还将培养一批工程师，他们可以将他们的技术培训与社会科学研究方法和培训相结合，以确保我们的技术系统是健壮的，对健康危机具有弹性。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The spread of the coronavirus (COVID-19) puts into stark relief the disparities in our nation’s infrastructure system. All the social and economic benefits that infrastructure provides--such as proximity to goods, services, and each other--become liabilities in times of pandemics. The systems that enhance our physical connectivity also make social distancing more difficult. The aim of this proposal is to characterize how these infrastructure disparities influence the spread of COVID-19 and who are made most vulnerable as a result. Prior studies argue that density and close physical proximity are crucial to positive social and economic outcomes. These studies also argue physical infrastructure is important in health outcomes, namely quicker access to critical medical and emergency services. However, the coronavirus makes closer physical proximity a liability as it makes engaging in social distancing more difficult. The contribution of this proposal is to understand and characterize this tension that the coronavirus makes salient in our physical infrastructure systems. By identifying “hot spots” of dense and proximate physical infrastructure, we can better target our nation’s limited testing capacity around vulnerable areas in the hopes of maintaining the benefits of physical infrastructure, while also mitigating its observed downsides in the face of a pandemic. Prior studies suggest that technology generates inequality due to the fact it is “skill-biased”. However, the coronavirus pandemic reveals a different possible mechanism. In this case, individuals may be similarly-skilled, but have dissimilarities in terms of access to digital infrastructure. This proposal seeks to assess this alternative mechanism in the hopes of targeting our limited economic stimulus resources to ease the economic burden on the pandemic's most vulnerable. The project will leverage demographic, economic, and infrastructure data and employ spatial diffusion and difference-in-difference models. In particular, the work will aggregate COVID-19 and healthcare utilization data from the CDC, federal, state and local health agencies, and academic institutions such as Johns Hopkins and compare this to data from the National Bridge Inventory, the FCC, Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, National Historical Geographic Information System, and O*Net, by the North Carolina Department of Commerce. This work pairs two types of infrastructure—physical and digital—to examine how the construction and availability of this infrastructure affects cities, both in terms of health and individual economic prosperity. The work is novel in that it problematizes physical infrastructure as being both a contributor to the spread of disease as well as a mechanism for combating it, and that it will assess how pandemics can generate wage inequality due to unequal access to digital infrastructure, even between individuals with similar skills. The research provides a relatively quick way to leverage variation in physical and digital infrastructure to a) identify those communities that are most in need of currently available, and highly limited funds and b) craft a rapid response and deployment strategy to help the nation to slow the transmission and economic impacts of the virus in the future. The work will have impacts across all of society, but is particularly targeted at underserved populations and those in lower wage industries that may not be able to easily take advantage of digital infrastructure. All of the data utilized are publicly available and the PI will make available the code on the CMU website. Furthermore, this project will also educate a group of engineers who can combine both their technical training with social science research methods and training to ensure our technical systems are robust and resilient to health crises.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.