Highly coordinated nationwide massive travel restrictions are central to effective mitigation and control of COVID-19 outbreaks in China.

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COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus 2019, has caused grave woes across the globe since it was first reported in the epicentre of Wuhan, Hubei, China, in December 2019. The spread of COVID-19 in China has been successfully curtailed by massive travel restrictions that rendered more than 900 million people housebound for more than two months since the lockdown of Wuhan, and elsewhere, on 23 January 2020. Here, we assess the impact of China’s massive lockdowns and travel restrictions reflected by the changes in mobility patterns across and within provinces, before and during the lockdown period. We calibrate movement flow between provinces with an epidemiological compartment model to quantify the effectiveness of lockdowns and reductions in disease transmission. Our analysis demonstrates that the onset and phase of local community transmission in other provinces depends on the cumulative population outflow received from the epicentre Hubei. Moreover, we show that synchronous lockdowns and consequent reduced mobility lag a certain time to elicit an actual impact on suppressing the spread. Such highly coordinated nationwide lockdowns, applied via a top-down approach along with high levels of compliance from the bottom up, are central to mitigating and controlling early-stage outbreaks and averting a massive health crisis.