Modeling COVID-19 spreading dynamics and unemployment rate evolution in rural and urban counties of Alabama and New York using fractional derivative models

The COVID-19 pandemic has been affecting the United States (U.S.) since the outbreak documented on 2/29/2020, and understanding its dynamics is critical for pandemic mitigation and economic recovery. This study proposed and applied novel time fractional derivative models (FDMs) to quantify the spatiotemporal dynamics of the COVID-19 pandemic spreading in the states of Alabama and New York, U.S., two states with quite different population compositions, urbanization, and industry structures. Model applications revealed that the pandemic evolving in the two states exhibited an overall similar time-dependent trend with subtle differences in propagation rates. Alabama may have more inter-county communications in rural areas than urban areas, while the opposite may be true for the New York State. Further analysis using the space FDM showed that the COVID-19 pandemic spread in rural/urban areas of the two states by following the tempered stable density distributions with different indexes, while the number of the state’s pandemic epicenters affected the pattern of the COVID-19 pandemic spreading in space. Finally, applications of a novel time FDM revealed that the evolution of the economy, represented by the weekly unemployment insurance claims in the two states, exhibited different spreading and recovery rates, most likely due to their different exposures and responses to the pandemic. Therefore, COVID-19 spreading dynamics exhibited strong and subtly different spatiotemporal memories in rural and urban areas in the Alabama and New York States, motivating the application of FDMs.