Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic is currently spreading widely around the world, causing huge threats to public safety and global society. This study analyzes the spatiotemporal pattern of the COVID-19 pandemic in China, reveals China's epicenters of the pandemic through spatial clustering, and delineates the substantial effect of distance to Wuhan on the pandemic spread. The results show that the daily new COVID-19 cases mostly occurred in and around Wuhan before March 6, and then moved to the Grand Bay Area (Shenzhen, Hong Kong and Macau). The total COVID-19 cases in China were mainly distributed in the east of the Huhuanyong Line, where the epicenters accounted for more than 60% of the country's total in/on 24 January and 7 February, half in/on 31 January, and more than 70% from 14 February. The total cases finally stabilized at approximately 84,000, and the inflection point for Wuhan was on 14 February, one week later than those of Hubei (outside Wuhan) and China (outside Hubei). The generalized additive model-based analysis shows that population density and distance to provincial cities were significantly associated with the total number of the cases, while distances to prefecture cities and intercity traffic stations, and population inflow from Wuhan after 24 January, had no strong relationships with the total number of cases. The results and findings should provide valuable insights for understanding the changes in the COVID-19 transmission as well as implications for controlling the global COVID-19 pandemic spread.
Highlights
At present, many countries have reported a high number of COVID-19 cases and the pandemic is raging around the world
Þs3ðDis2TrafStationÞ þ s4ðPopInflowÞ þ s5ðDis2PrefCityÞ þ d where L(cases) is a link function that represents the effects of influencing factors on the COVID-19 cases, β0 donates a constant, si() is a smoothing function that describes the relationships between L(cases) and the ith factor, and δ is the model residual
Before 17 January, the COVID-19 cases were confirmed in Wuhan only
Summary
Many countries have reported a high number of COVID-19 cases and the pandemic is raging around the world. As of August 20, the world has accumulated more than 20 million of the COVID-19 cases, threatening people’s health, economic development and social stability. The origin and birthplace of the COVID-19 pandemic are still being explored by biologists around the world [1,2,3]. In the era of globalization, China has not been immune from. The funder had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript
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