Modeling and interpreting the COVID-19 intervention strategy of China: A human mobility view

PLoS One. 2020 Nov 24;15(11):e0242761. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0242761. eCollection 2020.

Abstract

The Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) has proved a globally prevalent outbreak since December 2019. As a focused country to alleviate the epidemic impact, China implemented a range of public health interventions to prevent the disease from further transmission, including the pandemic lockdown in Wuhan and other cities. This paper establishes China's mobility network by a flight dataset and proposes a model without epidemiological parameters to indicate the spread risks through the network, which is termed as epidemic strength. By simply adjusting an intervention parameter, traffic volumes under different travel-restriction levels can be simulated to analyze how the containment strategy can mitigate the virus dissemination through traffic. This approach is successfully applied to a network of Chinese provinces and the epidemic strength is smoothly interpreted by flow maps. Through this node-to-node interpretation of transmission risks, both overall and detailed epidemic hazards are properly analyzed, which can provide valuable intervention advice during public health emergencies.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Beijing / epidemiology
  • COVID-19 / epidemiology*
  • COVID-19 / prevention & control*
  • COVID-19 / transmission
  • COVID-19 / virology
  • Emergencies
  • Humans
  • Models, Statistical*
  • Pandemics / prevention & control*
  • Physical Distancing*
  • Public Health
  • Quarantine / methods*
  • SARS-CoV-2*
  • Travel

Grants and funding

This material is based on work supported by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities under Grant No. 2010YD06.