Songhua Hu

Songhua Hu

CrowdSensing, Human Mobility, GeoAI, Network Science

Integrated modeling of human mobility and public health

During the COVID-19 pandemic, non-pharmaceutical interventions were widely employed to contain the dissemination of the virus by restricting people’s travel and physical contact. I have closely worked together with Prof. Chenfeng Xiong on building integrated econometric, epidemiological, and simulation models to examine (causal) relations among human mobility, public policies, vaccination, and virus transmission, which are critical to policy assessment, disease outbreak prediction, and public health management. Related work has led to several high-caliber publications, including one PNAS paper, over 5 top transportation papers, and an online University of Maryland COVID-19 Impact Analysis Platform.

Journals

  1. Hu, Songhua, Chenfeng Xiong, Yingrui Zhao, Xin Yuan, and Xuqiu Wang. “Vaccination, Mobility, and COVID-19 Health Outcomes: Empirical Comparison Before and During the Outbreak of SARS-Cov-2 B.1.1.529 (Omicron) Variant.” Vaccine (2023).
  2. Wei, Ran, Yujia Zhang, Song Gao, Brandon J. Brown, Songhua Hu, and Bruce G. Link. “Health disparity in the spread of COVID-19: Evidence from social distancing, risk of interactions, and access to testing.” Health & place 82 (2023): 103031.
  3. Hu, Songhua, Chenfeng Xiong, Qingchen Li, Zitong Wang, and Yuan Jiang. “COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy cannot fully explain disparities in vaccination coverage across the contiguous United States.” Vaccine (2022).
  4. Hu, Songhua, Chenfeng Xiong, Hannah Younes, Mofeng Yang, Aref Darzi, and Zhiyu Catherine Jin. “Examining spatiotemporal evolution of racial/ethnic disparities in human mobility and COVID-19 health outcomes: Evidence from the contiguous United States.” Sustainable cities and society 76 (2022): 103506.
  5. Hu, Songhua, Weiyu Luo, Aref Darzi, Yixuan Pan, Guangchen Zhao, Yuxuan Liu, and Chenfeng Xiong. “Do racial and ethnic disparities in following stay-at-home orders influence COVID-19 health outcomes? A mediation analysis approach.” PloS one 16, no. 11 (2021): e0259803.
  6. Luo, Weiyu, Wei Guo, Songhua Hu, Mofeng Yang, Xinyuan Hu, and Chenfeng Xiong. “Flatten the curve: Empirical evidence on how non-pharmaceutical interventions substituted pharmaceutical treatments during COVID-19 pandemic.” Plos one 16, no. 10 (2021): e0258379.
  7. Xiong, Chenfeng, Songhua Hu, Mofeng Yang, Weiyu Luo, and Lei Zhang. “Mobile device data reveal the dynamics in a positive relationship between human mobility and COVID-19 infections.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 117, no. 44 (2020): 27087-27089.