Publication date: Jun 26, 2025
We sought to understand whether cellular telephone activity in commercial spaces as a marker for population mobility would be associated with trauma admission volumes, taking advantage of cellular telephone data made available during the COVID-19 pandemic and large swings in population activity. Trauma registry data from six level I trauma centers (TC) in New England were used to identify the number of daily trauma admissions (TA) from January 20th 2020 to July 31st 2021. The Device Exposure Index (DEX) is a standardized measure of daily cellular telephone interactions with other cellular telephones within a county. Spearman’s rank correlation was calculated for the first wave of COVID-19 from March 2020 to May 2020 and for the entire study period. Center-specific Poisson models were created to control for seasonality. During the study period, daily mean TA was 42. 8 (SD 10. 7) and daily mean DEX was 60. 6 (SD 26. 8) overlapping device visits to venues per day. The daily DEX index was moderately correlated with TA from March to May of 2020 for five centers serving unique catchment areas, with Spearman’s rho ranging from 0. 22 to 0. 47 (p
| Concepts | Keywords |
|---|---|
| Covid | Activity |
| July | Cellular |
| March | Covid |
| Pandemic | Daily |
| Telephones | Device |
| Dex | |
| England | |
| Index | |
| March | |
| Pandemic | |
| Period | |
| Population | |
| Spearman | |
| Telephone | |
| Trauma |
Semantics
| Type | Source | Name |
|---|---|---|
| disease | IDO | cell |
| disease | MESH | COVID-19 Pandemic |
| drug | DRUGBANK | Dextromethorphan |