A Social Network Analysis Approach to Evaluate the Relationship Between the Mobility Network Metrics and the COVID-19 Outbreak

The emergence of the new coronavirus in late 2019 further highlighted the human need for solutions to explore various aspects of deadly pandemics. Providing these solutions will enable humans to be more prepared for dealing with possible future pandemics. In addition, it helps governments implement strategies to tackle and control infectious diseases similar to COVID-19 faster than ever before. In this article, we used the social network analysis (SNA) method to identify high-risk areas of the new coronavirus in Iran. First, we developed the mobility network through the transfer of passengers (edges) between the provinces (nodes) of Iran and then evaluated the in-degree and page rank centralities of the network. Next, we developed 2 Poisson regression (PR) models to predict high-risk areas of the disease in different populations (moderator) using the mobility network centralities (independent variables) and the number of patients (dependent variable). The P-value of .001 for both prediction models confirmed a meaningful interaction between our variables. Besides, the PR models revealed that in higher populations, with the increase of network centralities, the number of patients increases at a higher rate than in lower populations, and vice versa. In conclusion, our method helps governments impose more restrictions on high-risk areas to handle the COVID-19 outbreak and provides a viable solution for accelerating operations against future pandemics similar to the coronavirus.