Background: Since November 2019, the world has suffered the disastrous consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. No country has been spared either socially or economically. Given the inevitability of the spread of this virus, researches have been active to understand and to counteract the factors that anticipate its spread. In this research, we endorse population density as a catalyst factor for the proliferation of COVID-19 in Algeria. We are interested in the relationship between population density and the spread of COVID-19 in Algerian cities. The latter is characterized by a disparity in the concentration of the population according to the geographic location of each.
Results: The cluster analysis allowed us to isolate the groups of cities with the highest numbers of COVID-19 infected cases and the highest population densities. The regression models obtained suggest that there is a strong correlation between the population density and the number of COVID-19 infections in Algeria. This finding is verified by the correlation coefficients. Thus, it is estimated that population density has a positive effect on the spread of COVID-19 in the Algerian context during the study period.
Conclusions: The spread of COVID-19 in Algeria is increasing as the population density increases. Once this factor has been demonstrated, the fight against the proliferation of the virus can be thwarted by measures to raise public awareness of social distancing in public places namely supermarkets, markets, and cafes.
Keywords: Algeria; COVID-19; Cluster analysis; Correlation; Population density; Simple regression analysis.
© The Author(s) 2020.