COVID touch and travel data around US and foreign hospitals 2020-2021

Disaster documentation has traditionally been considered a single location, post-event activity, but increasingly there is the recognition that disasters can impact multiple communities over a relatively short period of time and that there is significant value in understanding population response in near real-time, as a threat moves across communities. To this end, this study used on-the-ground observers to capture perishable data at more than a dozen domestic healthcare facilities (hospitals and urgent care centers) and similar hospital in 5 international locations. This was done for approximately 2 months at each location to observe street-level behavior of individuals leaving COVID-19 medical facilities. The documentation includes gender, touch behavior, mask usage, and choices of both destination and transportation. This project was a follow on to a similar, exclusively NYC-based study previously conducted over 9 weeks in the Spring 2020 at the onset of COVID-19. The project was coordinated out of New York University by Prof. Debra Laefer from the Tandon School of Engineering and Christopher Dickey of the School of Global Public Health but with significant support in Lebanon from Dr. Martine Najem of the America University of Beirut and in Mexico by Dr. Isidro Gutiérrez of the Autonomous University of Querétaro. The NYU team trained all domestic participants, the NYU students in Haiti, Russia, and Canada, and the local leadership teams in Queretaro and Beirut, who in turn trained their local observers.