| NSF Org: |
SMA SBE Office of Multidisciplinary Activities |
| Recipient: |
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| Initial Amendment Date: | June 29, 2020 |
| Latest Amendment Date: | June 29, 2020 |
| Award Number: | 2028496 |
| Award Instrument: | Standard Grant |
| Program Manager: |
Mary Feeney
SMA SBE Office of Multidisciplinary Activities SBE Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences |
| Start Date: | June 15, 2020 |
| End Date: | May 31, 2022 (Estimated) |
| Total Intended Award Amount: | $176,574.00 |
| Total Awarded Amount to Date: | $176,574.00 |
| Funds Obligated to Date: |
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| History of Investigator: |
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| Recipient Sponsored Research Office: |
5000 FORBES AVE PITTSBURGH PA US 15213-3815 (412)268-8746 |
| Sponsor Congressional District: |
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| Primary Place of Performance: |
PA US 15213-3890 |
| Primary Place of
Performance Congressional District: |
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| Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): |
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| Parent UEI: |
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| NSF Program(s): | Science of Science |
| Primary Program Source: |
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| Program Reference Code(s): |
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| Program Element Code(s): |
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| Award Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Fund Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Assistance Listing Number(s): | 47.075 |
ABSTRACT
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.
PROJECT OUTCOMES REPORT
Disclaimer
This Project Outcomes Report for the General Public is displayed verbatim as submitted by the Principal Investigator (PI) for this award. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this Report are those of the PI and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation; NSF has not approved or endorsed its content.
Ultimately, this work sets a way for how infrastructure can be used as a social sensor for assessing where existing infrastructure perpetuates aspects of marginalization within the United States. Using existing infrastructure skews and gaps to inform how policy and investment in infrastructure can address existing inequities more sharply and proactively. This flips the existing paradigm by treating infrastructure as a proxy for bias for which infrastructure can alleviate (current bias->future infrastructure), rather than only showing how existing infrastructure has generated structural biases (past infrastructure -> current bias). In other words, we are use infrastructure not just as a "social autopsy" of current social ills but as a "social biopsy" for hopefully alleviating such ills in the future. We explored these possibilities through analyzing how gaps in broadband provision and other forms of infrastructure access have on various populations during the stay-at-home mandates implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Intellectual Merit:
- Relationship between COVID + infrastructure: Our proposal argued that by ascertaining the connection between physical infrastructure and the spread of the coronavirus, we can better understand where limited resources and testing ought to be targeted. In this manner, we can more quickly mitigate spread. In particular, our preliminary analysis of Aim 1 (which we are working to verify and output into a full manuscript) suggest that indeed water moratorium (i.e., policy that prevents water shutoffs, even for those who could not afford to pay their bills) did decrease case load, suggesting this is a key way to leverage infrastructure in the service of preventing pandemic spread.
- Role of broadband for addressing equity: In a coronavirus world that is increasingly necessitating self-isolation and virtual work, we find broadband may a key way to avoid pandemic spread but also its gaps in access can serve as a way to identify populations vulnerable to pandemic spread (i.e., pioneering an "infrastructure as social sensor" approach to identifying marginalization more quickly, which is important in limiting pandemic spread)
Broader Impacts
- Identifying those unique channels of physical connectivity through which there is naturally less social distance, and thus more likelihood of cases requiring isolation to blunt the spread. This may help address concerns of the administration with regards to the “unintended consequences” of disrupting physical infrastructure and how it can be used to actually understand the spread. Simultaneously, quickly identifying locales with less broadband access is vital to ensure that the coronavirus (and pandemics like it) does not also cause irrecoverable economic burdens. Given 40% of Americans cannot pay a $400 emergency expense, a sudden loss of even $400 in income due the coronavirus could be economically devastating. Thus, there is rapid need to also identify those vulnerable communities not just in terms of health but also economic outcomes; infrastructure is a potentially useful way to do that as part of a rapid response and deployment strategy.
Last Modified: 01/14/2023
Modified by: Daniel Armanios
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