Global Pandemic is a research programme that turned the COVID-19 pandemic into a planetary natural experiment. Using geospatial big data — geotagged social-media text, mobility signals and epidemiological modelling — it asks how a virus moves through people: how it reshapes expressed emotion, daily mobility and economic life, and how public-health measures bend those curves.
Themes
Emotions and society. From the global collapse and rebound of expressed sentiment during the pandemic, to fine-grained changes in daily-life fear perception.
Economic recovery. A large-scale field experiment in China showing how to encourage the resumption of economic activity after lockdowns.
Public-health measures. Disentangling how non-pharmaceutical interventions and vaccination shaped COVID-19 trajectories across Europe, how measures zeroed out successive SARS-CoV-2 variants, and which resumption strategies could flatten reopening-driven outbreaks.
Mobility and behaviour. Measuring Chinese mobility during the pandemic from geotagged social-media data, and how emotions shifted — including visiting green spaces — after the lifting of zero-COVID policies.
A natural experiment for the environment. Lockdowns offered a rare experiment to quantify human contributions to near-surface temperature inversions.
Ten of the programme's papers are listed below.
Collaboration
Developed with collaborators across the MIT Sustainable Urbanization Lab, the University of Southampton, and the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research (IGSNRR), Chinese Academy of Sciences.
