We use anonymized and aggregated data from Facebook to show that areas with stronger social ties to two early COVID-19 "hotspots" (Westchester County, NY, in the U.S. and Lodi province in Italy) generally have more confirmed COVID-19 cases as of March 30, 2020. These relationships hold after controlling for geographic distance to the hotspots as well as for the income and population density of the regions. These results suggest that data from online social networks may prove useful to epidemiologists and others hoping to forecast the spread of communicable diseases such as COVID-19.

中文翻译：

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COVID-19 的地理传播与 Facebook 衡量的社交网络结构相关

我们使用来自 Facebook 的匿名和汇总数据表明，与两个早期 COVID-19“热点”（美国纽约州威彻斯特县和意大利洛迪省）社会联系更紧密的地区通常有更多确诊的 COVID-19 病例2020 年 3 月 30 日。这些关系在控制到热点的地理距离以及地区的收入和人口密度之后成立。这些结果表明，来自在线社交网络的数据可能对流行病学家和其他希望预测 COVID-19 等传染病传播的人有用。