Estimation of local novel coronavirus (COVID-19) cases in Wuhan, China from off-site reported cases and population flow data from different sources

Zian Zhuang; Peihua Cao; Shi Zhao; Yijun Lou; Weiming Wang; Shu Yang; Lin Yang; Daihai He

In December 2019, a cluster of patients with pneumonia of unknown causes were reported in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China [1] . On 7 January 2020, a novel coronavirus, named COVID-19, was identified as the cause of this outbreak [2] . This COVID-19 virus shares the common characteristics of coronavirus and is expected to become more virulent when establishing efficient human-to-human transmission [3] . The emergence of this virus coincided with the Spring Festival Travel Rush in China. It was estimated that there would be around 3 billion trips made in China during the period of 10 January to 18 February 2020 [4] . Some researchers have pointed out the risk of regional and global disease spreading during the Spring Festival Travel Rush [5] . However, due to the small number of severe patients reported by mid-January and most cases were linked to the Huanan . CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license It is made available under a author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity.