Abstract
Gauging viral transmission through human mobility in order to contain the COVID-19 pandemic has been a hot topic in academic studies and evidence-based policy-making. Although it is widely accepted that there is a strong positive correlation between the transmission of the coronavirus and the mobility of the general public, there are limitations to existing studies on this topic. For example, using digital proxies of mobile devices/apps may only partially reflect the movement of individuals; using the mobility of the general public and not COVID-19 patients in particular, or only using places where patients were diagnosed to study the spread of the virus may not be accurate; existing studies have focused on either the regional or national spread of COVID-19, and not the spread at the city level; and there are no systematic approaches for understanding the stages of transmission to facilitate the policy-making to contain the spread.To address these issues, we have developed a new methodological framework for COVID-19 transmission analysis based upon individual patients’ trajectory data. By using innovative space–time analytics, this framework reveals the spatiotemporal patterns of patients’ mobility and the transmission stages of COVID-19 from Wuhan to the rest of China at finer spatial and temporal scales. It can improve our understanding of the interaction of mobility and transmission, identifying the risk of spreading in small and medium-sized cities that have been neglected in existing studies. This demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed framework and its policy implications to contain the COVID-19 pandemic.
Highlights
1 Introduction Since the first case of COVID-19 was confirmed in December 2019 in Wuhan, China, over 134 million people have been infected with the disease and it has caused nearly 2.9 million deaths in 190 countries or regions, as of April 2021 (World Health Organisation, 2021)
4 Results Here, we present the exploratory analysis of the trajectory data from January 21 to February 20, 2019, when the outbreak of COVID-19 started in Wuhan and was transmitted to the rest of the country at its peak
As mainland China was the region where the early outbreak started, studying the transmission of COVID-19 is of great significance to formulating effective epidemic prevention and control measures
Summary
Since the first case of COVID-19 was confirmed in December 2019 in Wuhan, China, over 134 million people have been infected with the disease and it has caused nearly 2.9 million deaths in 190 countries or regions, as of April 2021 (World Health Organisation, 2021). Researchers have devoted themselves extensively to analysing the characteristics of COVID-19 from multidisciplinary perspectives, including but not limited to its epidemiological and genomic characterisations (Lu et al, 2020), clinical features (Guan et al, 2020; Vetter et al, 2020), incubation period (Backer, Klinkenberg, & Wallinga, 2020), and asymptomatic carriers (Bai et al, 2020) Such studies have made valuable contributions to the treatments and vaccines used to suppress the disease (Kaur & Gupta, 2020; Kupferschmidt & Cohen, 2020). In order to contain the spread of COVID-19, it is important to estimate human mobility and gauge its relationship with the viral transmission pattern This task has aroused much attention in academia and in governmental sectors pursuing evidence-based policy-making (Raboisson & Lhermie, 2020)
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