  We study the effects of physical distancing measures for the spread of
COVID-19 in regional areas within British Columbia, using the reported cases of
the five provincial Health Authorities. Building on the Bayesian
epidemiological model of Anderson et al. (2020), we propose a hierarchical
Bayesian model with time-varying regional parameters to account for the
relative reduction in contact due to physical distancing and increased testing
from March to December of 2020. In the absence of COVID-19 variants and
vaccinations during this period, we examine the regionalized basic reproduction
number, modelled prevalence, fraction of normal contacts, proportion of
anticipated cases, and we observed significant differences between the
provincial-wide and regional models.
