Investigating the Effects of Control Strategies of Urban Bus Systems during the early outbreak of COVID-19 epidemic in China: a Survey of 211 cities

Abstract

Whether large-scale COVID-19 tightening policies related to public transit contribute to slower rises in COVID-19 infection rates remains debatable. Therefore, this article extracted text data on urban bus control strategies in 211 Chinese cities and recorded active confirmed cases per million persons per day in each city. The Kruskal-Wallis one-way ANOVA test (K samples) and accompanying pairwise comparisons were conducted using SPSS. Analysis shows that there are noticeable regional differences in the northern and southern parts of China during the pandemic in the control of public transit. Furthermore, based on the economic scale of the same population level, a comparison was made between all cities with high control intensity and some with low control intensity. We find no significant differences in the number of people diagnosed with COVID-19 between the two pairs of some of the compared cities, indicating that the public transport control strategies of some cities are overly strict and questionable. The heat maps of pairwise comparisons show that city pairs with no significant differences in the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases account for many city clusters in the same interval. Additionally, in the comparative analysis of cities with the same population base, the proportion of no significant difference in the statistical analysis results of the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases increased with the decrease of the economic level of the cities. This pattern reflects the overly strict bus control strategies of some less economically developed cities during the COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, in the face of large-scale epidemics in the future, policies should formulate control strategies based on reality.