Crowded homes, poor neighborhoods linked to COVID-19

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-06/cuim-chp061820.php

News Release 18-Jun-2020
Columbia University Irving Medical Center


A study of nearly 400 pregnant women in New York City is among the first to show that lower neighborhood socioeconomic status and greater household crowding increase the risk of becoming infected with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.

"Our study shows that neighborhood socioeconomic status and household crowding are strongly associated with risk of infection. This may explain why Black and Hispanic people living in these neighborhoods are disproportionately at risk for contracting the virus," says the study's leader Alexander Melamed, MD, MPH, assistant professor of obstetrics & gynecology at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons and a gynecologic oncologist at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia University Irving Medical Center.

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The strongest predictor of COVID-19 infection among these women was residence in a neighborhood where households with many people are common.

Women who lived in a neighborhood with high household membership were 3 times more likely to be infected with the virus.

Neighborhood poverty also appeared to be a factor: women were twice as likely to get COVID-19 if they lived in neighborhoods with a high poverty rate, although that relationship was not statistically significant due to the small sample size.

There was no association between infection and population density.

"New York City has the highest population density of any city in the United States, but our study found that the risks are related more to density in people's domestic environments rather than density in the city or within neighborhoods," says co-author Cynthia Gyamfi-Bannerman, MD, the Ellen Jacobson Levine and Eugene Jacobson Professor of Women's Health in Columbia's Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology and a maternal-fetal medicine specialist at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia University Irving Medical Center.

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