Types of COVID-19 clusters and their relationship with social distancing in the Seoul metropolitan area, South Korea
•All the reported COVID-19 clusters were identified and categorized in South Korea.•COVID-19 clusters are categorized into large, medium, and small clusters.•Cluster distributions are correlated with the government’s social distancing measures. The complete contact tracing of coronavirus disease-19...
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Veröffentlicht in: | International journal of infectious diseases 2021-05, Vol.106, p.363-369 |
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Sprache: | eng |
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Zusammenfassung: | •All the reported COVID-19 clusters were identified and categorized in South Korea.•COVID-19 clusters are categorized into large, medium, and small clusters.•Cluster distributions are correlated with the government’s social distancing measures.
The complete contact tracing of coronavirus disease-19 (COVID-19) cases in South Korea allows a unique opportunity to investigate cluster characteristics. This study aimed to investigate all reported COVID-19 clusters in the Seoul metropolitan area from January 23 to September 24, 2020.
Publicly available COVID-19 data was collected from the Seoul Metropolitan City and Gyeonggi Province. Community clusters with ≥5 cases were characterized by size and duration, categorized using K-means clustering, and the correlation between the types of clusters and the level of social distancing investigated.
A total of 134 clusters comprised of 4033 cases were identified. The clusters were categorized into small (type I and II), medium (type III), and large (type IV) clusters. A comparable number of daily reported cases in different time periods were composed of different types of clusters. Increased social distancing was related to a shift from large to small-sized clusters.
Classification of clusters may provide opportunities to understand the pattern of COVID-19 outbreaks better and implement more effective suppression strategies. Social distancing administered by the government may effectively suppress large clusters but may not effectively control small and sporadic clusters. |
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ISSN: | 1201-9712 1878-3511 |
DOI: | 10.1016/j.ijid.2021.02.058 |