Abstract
The ongoing coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has wreaked havoc worldwide with millions of lives claimed, human travel restricted and economic development halted. Leveraging city-level mobility and case data, our analysis shows that the spatial dissemination of COVID-19 can be well explained by a local diffusion process in the mobility network rather than a global diffusion process, indicating the effectiveness of the implemented disease prevention and control measures. Based on the constructed case prediction model, it is estimated that there could be distinct social consequences if the COVID-19 outbreak happened in different areas. During the epidemic control period, human mobility experienced substantial reductions and the mobility network underwent remarkable local and global structural changes toward containing the spread of COVID-19. Our work has important implications for the mitigation of disease and the evaluation of the socio-economic consequences of COVID-19 on society.
Highlights
Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), which caused coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), was identified in Wuhan in December 2019 and diffused across mainland China, coinciding with mass human migration during the Spring Festival period [1,2]
Using human mobility and case data across more than 360 cities in mainland China, we construct a national human mobility network and assess how the spatial dissemination of COVID-19 is associated with the mobility patterns and what could it be if the COVID-19 outbreak had occurred in different areas
Our analysis suggests that the spatial dissemination of COVID-19 in mainland China can be well explained by the human flow from Wuhan and the city population, which constitutes a local diffusion process in the mobility network, rather than a global diffusion process, where cities located at central positions are likely to have more cases due to travels of the infected people
Summary
Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), which caused coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), was identified in Wuhan (the provincial capital of Hubei province) in December 2019 and diffused across mainland China, coinciding with mass human migration during the Spring Festival period [1,2]. Our analysis suggests that the spatial dissemination of COVID-19 in mainland China can be well explained by the human flow from Wuhan and the city population, which constitutes a local diffusion process in the mobility network, rather than a global diffusion process, where cities located at central positions are likely to have more cases due to travels of the infected people. This indicates the effectiveness of the implemented disease prevention and control measures, where most of the infected people were quarantined or isolated during the epidemic control period, largely preventing further transmission to other areas. The estimation suggests that the place that the outbreak occurred would play an important role in shaping the spatial prevalence of COVID-19
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