A place-based analysis of COVID-19 risk factors in Bangladesh urban slums: a secondary analysis of World Bank microdata

Abstract

Background

There is a lack of research investigating the confluence of risk factors in urban slums that may make them accelerators for respiratory, droplet infections like COVID-19. Our working hypothesis was that, even within slums, an inverse relationship existed between living density and access to shared or private WASH facilities.

Methods

In an exploratory, secondary analysis of World Bank, cross-sectional microdata from slums in Bangladesh we investigated the relationship between intra-household population density (crowding) and access to private or shared water sources and toilet facilities.

Results

The analysis showed that most households were single-room dwellings (80.4%). Median crowding ranged from 0.55 m² per person up to 67.7 m² per person. The majority of the dwellings (83.3%), shared both toilet facilities and the source of water, and there was a significant positive relationship between crowding and the use of shared facilities.

Conclusion

The findings highlight the practical constraints on implementing, in slums, the conventional COVID19 management approaches of social distancing, regular hand washing, and not sharing spaces. It has implications for the management of future respiratory epidemics.

Rights

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.

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Identifiers

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-021-10230-z

Repository URI

https://eresearch.qmu.ac.uk/handle/20.500.12289/12834/12834