Revisiting the Effects of High-Speed Railway Transfers in the Early COVID-19 Cross-Province Transmission in Mainland China.

Chun-Hsiang Chan,Tzai-Hung Wen

doi:10.3390/ijerph18126394

Abstract

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is an ongoing pandemic that was reported at the end of 2019 in Wuhan, China, and was rapidly disseminated to all provinces in around one month. The study aims to assess the changes in intercity railway passenger transport on the early spatial transmission of COVID-19 in mainland China. Examining the role of railway transport properties in disease transmission could help quantify the spatial spillover effects of large-scale travel restriction interventions. This study used daily high-speed railway schedule data to compare the differences in city-level network properties (destination arrival and transfer service) before and after the Wuhan city lockdown in the early stages of the spatial transmission of COVID-19 in mainland China. Bayesian multivariate regression was used to examine the association between structural changes in the railway origin-destination network and the incidence of COVID-19 cases. Our results show that the provinces with rising transfer activities after the Wuhan city lockdown had more confirmed COVID-19 cases, but changes in destination arrival did not have significant effects. The regions with increasing transfer activities were located in provinces neighboring Hubei in the widthwise and longitudinal directions. These results indicate that transfer activities enhance interpersonal transmission probability and could be a crucial risk factor for increasing epidemic severity after the Wuhan city lockdown. The destinations of railway passengers might not be affected by the Wuhan city lockdown, but their itinerary routes could be changed due to the replacement of an important transfer hub (Wuhan city) in the Chinese railway transportation network. As a result, transfer services in the high-speed rail network could explain why the provinces surrounded by Hubei had a higher number of confirmed COVID-19 cases than other provinces.

Highlights

For a respiratory infectious disease, person-to-person contact plays a vital role in the transmission of an epidemic, and a large population flow raises the probability of contact between people [1,2,3,4,5,6]
Our study provides another possible pathway to explain why the provinces surrounded by Hubei had a higher number of confirmed COVID-19 cases than other provinces
Different from previous studies, our results show no relationship between the changes in PageRank centrality and early COVID-19 transmission, but the changes in betweenness centrality are significantly related to the incidence of confirmed COVID-19 cases after the Wuhan city lockdown

Summary

Introduction

For a respiratory infectious disease, person-to-person contact plays a vital role in the transmission of an epidemic, and a large population flow raises the probability of contact between people [1,2,3,4,5,6]. An imported case of the disease could trigger a serious local outbreak. Border control policies could be an effective measure to prevent imported cases from causing local outbreaks. Recent studies have focused on assessing the effectiveness of national border control policies in containing the domestic and global spread of respiratory infectious diseases, such as body temperature screening in airports and comprehensive travel history investigations [7,8,9,10,11,12,13]. The primary reason is that the implementation of border control is too slow and that local transmission has already occurred by the time it is implemented

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