Local Factors of COVID-19 Severity in Russian Urban Areas

Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated that the lack of consideration of the local specifics of territories—the specifics of socioeconomic interactions, characteristics of the labor market—when developing measures to respond to epidemiological threats leads to serious social or economic consequences. The creation of a typology of municipalities (in this study of urban okrugs) makes it possible to more accurately select measures to regulate socioeconomic interactions in the event of future complications of the epidemiological situation. Clustering of municipalities according to a set of local factors that significantly explain the severity of the pandemic in its first year made it possible to identify three types of urban okrugs, differing both in population size and intensity of socioeconomic interactions: these are key service centers with a high intensity of interactions, local centers with medium intensity of interactions, and small cities with low intensity of interactions.