The most places at risk surrounding the COVID-19 treatment hospitals in an urban environment- case study: Tehran city

Investigations on the spatial patterns of COVID-19 spreading indicate the possibility of the virus transmission by moving infected people in an urban area. Hospitals are the most susceptible locations due to the COVID-19 contaminations in metropolises. This paper aims to find the riskiest places surrounding the hospitals using an MLP-ANN. The main contribution is discovering the influence zone of COVID-19 treatment hospitals and the main spatial factors around them that increase the prevalence of COVID-19. The innovation of this paper is to find the most relevant spatial factors regarding the distance from central hospitals modeling the risk level of the study area. Therefore, eight hospitals with two service areas for each of them are computed with [0–500] and [500–1000] meters distance. Besides, five spatial factors have been considered, consist of the location of patients’ financial transactions, the distance of streets from hospitals, the distance of highways from hospitals, the distance of the non-residential land use from the hospitals, and the hospital patient number. The implementation results revealed a meaningful relation between the distance from the hospitals and patient density. The RMSE and R measures are 0.00734 and 0.94635 for [0–500 m] while these quantities are 0.054088 and 0.902725 for [500–1000 m] respectively. These values indicate the role of distance to central hospitals for COVID-19 treatment. Moreover, a sensitivity analysis demonstrated that the number of patients’ transactions and the distance of the non-residential land use from the hospitals are two dominant factors for virus propagation. The results help urban managers to begin preventative strategies to decrease the community incidence rate in high-risk places.