  Vector control strategies are central to the mitigation and containment of
COVID-19 and have come in the form of municipal ordinances that restrict the
operational status of public and private spaces and associated services. Yet,
little is known about specific population responses in terms of risk behaviors.
To help understand the impact of those vector control variable strategies, a
multi-week, multi-site observational study was undertaken outside of 19 New
York City medical facilities during the peak of the city's initial COVID-19
wave (03/22/20-05/19/20). The aim was to capture perishable data of the touch,
destination choice, and PPE usage behavior of individuals egressing hospitals
and urgent care centers. A major goal was to establish an empirical basis for
future research on the way people interact with three-dimensional vector
environments. Anonymized data were collected via smart phones. Each data record
includes the time, data, and location of an individual leaving a healthcare
facility, their routing, interactions with the build environment, other
individuals, and themselves. Most records also note their PPE usage,
destination, intermediary stops, and transportation choices. The records were
linked with 61 socio-economic factors by the facility zip code and 7
contemporaneous weather factors and the merged in a unified shapefile in an
ARCGIS system. This paper describes the project team and protocols used to
produce over 5,100 publicly accessible observational records and an affiliated
codebook that can be used to study linkages between individual behaviors and
on-the-ground conditions.
