An investigation of transmission control measures during the first 50 days of the COVID-19 epidemic in China

By H. Tian, Yonghong Liu, Yidan Li, Chieh-Hsi Wu, Bin Chen, M. Kraemer, Bingying Li, Jun Cai, Bo Xu, Qiqi Yang and 11 more. Science, 2020

1,779 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The most effective interventions By 23 January 2020, China had imposed a national emergency response to restrict travel and impose social distancing measures on its populace in an attempt to inhibit the transmission of severe acute respiratory syndrome–coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). However, which measures were most effective is uncertain. Tian et al. performed a quantitative analysis of the impact of control measures between 31 December 2019 and 19 February 2020, which encompasses the Lunar New Year period when millions of people traveled across China for family visits. Travel restrictions in and out of Wuhan were too late to prevent the spread of the virus to 262 cities within 28 days. However, the epidemic peaked in Hubei province on 4 February 2020, indicating that measures such as closing citywide public transport and entertainment venues and banning public gatherings combined to avert hundreds of thousands of cases of infection. It is unlikely that this decline happened because the supply of susceptible people was exhausted, so relaxing control measures could lead to a resurgence. Science, this issue p. 638 Travel restrictions and the national emergency response delayed the growth and limited the size of the COVID-19 epidemic in China. Responding to an outbreak of a novel coronavirus [agent of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19)] in December 2019, China banned travel to and from Wuhan city on 23 January 2020 and implemented a national emergency response. We investigated the spread and control of COVID-19 using a data set that included case reports, human movement, and public health interventions. The Wuhan shutdown was associated with the delayed arrival of COVID-19 in other cities by 2.91 days. Cities that implemented control measures preemptively reported fewer cases on average (13.0) in the first week of their outbreaks compared with cities that started control later (20.6). Suspending intracity public transport, closing entertainment venues, and banning public gatherings were associated with reductions in case incidence. The national emergency response appears to have delayed the growth and limited the size of the COVID-19 epidemic in China, averting hundreds of thousands of cases by 19 February (day 50).

Subfields: Clinical Psychology, Economics and Econometrics, Modeling and Simulation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e9a494606cecbdcc9f4f3e867b27ccae4d5c0c5f

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Citations in the corpus

The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Consumption: Learning from High-Frequency Transaction Data (2020, background): “Greenstone and Nigam (2020) and Fang, Wang, and Yang (2020) find such measures are effective in containing the virus’ spread.”
Enhanced secondary pollution offset reduction of primary emissions during COVID-19 lockdown in China (2020, background): “Efforts to control the spread of the 2019 novel coronavirus (COVID-19) have drastically reduced human activities worldwide [1,2].”
Airborne transmission of SARS-CoV-2: The world should face the reality (2020, background): “Countries have enacted emergency response procedures, and travel bans have been put in place (Tian et al. 2020), and lockdown procedures which limit the movement of people inside the administrative zones.”
Non-pharmaceutical interventions during the COVID-19 pandemic: A review (2020, background): “[33] Huaiyu Tian, Yonghong Liu, Yidan Li, Chieh-Hsi Wu, Bin Chen, Moritz U.”
Ranking the effectiveness of worldwide COVID-19 government interventions (2020, methodology): “The comparison is made via a linear regression model adjusting for (1) epidemic age (days after the country has reached 30 confirmed cases), (2) the value of Rt before M takes effect, (3) total population, (4) population density, (5) the total number of NPIs implemented and (6) the number of NPIs im”
COVID-19 Outbreak in Colombia: An Analysis of Its Impacts on Transport Systems (2020, background): “'ey were also suspending intracity public transport, closing entertainment venues, and banning public gatherings [6].”
Acceptance of COVID-19 Vaccination during the COVID-19 Pandemic in China (2020, background): “To address these challenges, China has taken drastic measures and public health interventions to control the transmission of COVID-19 since the outbreak of the disease, and these actions have substantially mitigated the spread of COVID-19 [32,33,36].”