Epidemiological and clinical characteristics of COVID-19 in Shenzhen, the largest migrant city of China

Ying Wen; Lan Wei; Yuan Li; Xiujuan Tang; Shuo Feng; Kathy Leung; Xiaoliang Wu; Xiong-Fei Pan; Cong Chen; Junjie Xia; Xuan Zou; Tiejian Feng; Shujiang Mei

As one of the most developed and commercialized cities in China, Shenzhen is the largest migrant city where over 80% of its population (20 million) are migrants. The risk of case importation in Shenzhen was therefore high, especially because the COVID-19 epidemic occurred around the Chinese Lunar New Year holiday season during which intra-city mobility of the migrant population was extremely high. Since the first case of COVID-19 in Shenzhen was confirmed on Jan 20, 2020, local authorities activated the highest level of emergency response to the disease. Although there have been several studies on the transmission, epidemiology and clinical symptoms of COVID-19 in Wuhan (3, 5, 6) , data from other epidemic areas are still lacking (7) . In particular, information and knowledge of COVID-19 from a migrant city with high population mobility like Shenzhen can inform effective prevention and control strategies in other similar settings. As such, we investigated the epidemiological and clinical characteristics of all 417 cases that were confirmed in Shenzhen . CC-BY-ND 4.0 International license It is made available under a is the author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity.