Category Archives: Discussion

Our study examines the impacts of COVID-19 from not only a health perspective, but also economically from an individual to commercial standpoint.

Additionally, from the health perspective, weights to the MCE were attributed by mortality rate, including also exposure to PM2.5 which previous studies have found to correlate with increased COVID-19 related deaths.

There are limitations to this study that need to be recognized. Firstly, the occupations are categorized by CHASS, and a wide array of occupations may fall under one category. Some occupations within the category may not be affected by coronavirus, but some may. The end result would be that there would be no significant impact. The results of most of the occupation-related data depends on how CHASS categorized the jobs, as well as how they measured employment rate especially for those who are self-employed.

Secondly, for the commercial industry areas at risk, there are multiple points where some areas may be publicly owned. This made it difficult to include these areas, such as private schools, so we decided to omit them. This may lead to a few errors in our analysis as we wanted to focus solely on commercial business areas. Additionally, being able to know which exact points are closed and to what extent they are economically impacted is difficult to measure.

Thirdly, we did not have access to pre-existing health conditions per DA such as those who are immunocompromised or have underlying heart conditions. These medical conditions have been shown to contribute to higher risk of severe illness from COVID-19 hence should be considered for a thorough health impacts analysis(CDC, 2019). Additionally, data of known COVID-19 cases would increase health risks due to community spread. Known cases that are publicly available are only by region which made it difficult to use for our final study (BC Government, 2020).

Additionally, for all of our MCE’s, if the weights that we apply to each layer is changed, there could be slight variations to the final product. In addition, a sensitivity analysis should be conducted to examine if a different normalization approach was used, how that would affect the results. Although we conducted both an equally-weighted analysis and weighted MCE based on AHP results for identifying physically at-risk regions and compared the difference by sight observation, a more sophisticated study requires precise comparisons.

In order to combat the issue of change in weights, a sensitivity analysis should be done for each MCE layer in order to identify potential changes in the final map product if weights are changed. If there is possibility to, addition of COVID-19 presence cases would benefit the health populations at-risk layer, as well as addition of population density. An MCE for the occupation exploration could be done as well, weighted by their % job loss to identify the highest regions of occupation loss.