Neighbor Score: Impact of Neighboring Regions in COVID-19 Outbreak

Abstract

COVID-19 has affected people from all over the globe. This highly contagious disease is spreading from one region to another by people through traveling. The authorities are now trying to identify high-risk and low-risk regions considering each region as isolated. In reality, the regions of a country are connected through buses, trains and, airplanes, etc and peoples are taking steps to go elsewhere to earn their livelihood. So, preventive and protective measures like lock-down fail to be effective. In this paper, we propose a metric named  Neighbor Score to determine the actual invaded scenario of a region considering its adjacent i.e. neighbor regions. As a part of this research, an experiment is conducted with different COVID-19 affected regions of Bangladesh. The experiment has found that the coefficient correlation value of neighboring regions' total COVID-19 cases is positive (0.54 for 50% regions). We have also ranked and zoned the different regions of Bangladesh applying the Neighbor Score.