  We investigated daily COVID-19 cases and death in the 337 lower tier local
authority regions in England and Wales to better understand how the disease
propagated over a 10-month period. Population density scaling models revealed
residual variance and skewness to be sensitive indicators of the dynamics of
propagation. Lockdowns and schools reopening triggered increased variance
indicative of outbreaks with local impact and country scale heterogeneity.
University reopening and December holidays triggered reduced variance
indicative of country scale homogenisation which reached a minimum after New
Year. Homogeneous propagation was associated with better correspondence with
normally distributed residuals while heterogeneous propagation was more
consistent with skewed models. Skewness varied from strongly negative to
strongly positive revealing an unappreciated feature of community propagation.
Hot spots and super-spreading events are well understood descriptors of
regional disease dynamics that would be expected to be associated with
positively skewed distributions. Positively skewed behaviour was observed;
however, negative skewness indicative of cold-spots and super-isolation
dominated for approximately 4 months during the period of study. In contrast,
death metrics showed near constant behaviour in scaling, variance, and skewness
metrics over the full period with rural regions preferentially affected, an
observation consistent with regional age demographics in England and Wales.
