Analysing the link between public transport use and airborne transmission: mobility and contagion in the London underground

Table 3 Correlation coefficients between the rates of observed ILI cases and some 2015 demographic data for each borough from London Datastore [25]

Rates	Correlation coefficients	p-value
Underground related contacts	0.44	0.0293
Population size	0.3381	0.0676
Inner densities	0.41	0.0151
Employment rates	-0.44	0.0433
Employment with degree	-0.08	1.0000
Benefits claimants	0.54	0.0031
Cars per households	-0.43	0.0103
Population aged 0–15 years old	0.13	0.8504
Population aged 65+	-0.5782	0.0012

Since the mean incidence rate is 9.73, we divided boroughs into two groups: high incidence rates (≥10, n=15)) and low incidence rates (<10, n=11) and demographic data were divided accordingly. Mann-Whitney U-test was run for all of them with the null hypothesis of both sets having an equal median. It can be seen that, in relation to the spread of infectious diseases, the use of public transport can possibly play a role comparable to the one played by some key factors such as inner densities and employment rates and population by age

ISSN: 1476-069X