Exponential damping key to successful containment of COVID-19 outbreak

Feng Zhang; Jinmei Zhang; Menglan Cao; Yong Zhang; Cang Hui

The 2019 novel coronavirus , which can cause acute pneumonia, was first reported in Wuhan in December 2019, the capital of Hubei Province in central China (1, 2) . Due to the excessively high rate of human-to-human transmission, the virus has quickly spread across all provinces of China and all countries of the world (3). In order to contain this outbreak, governments and healthcare authorities across the globe have taken a series of strict public health measures. Wuhan and all major cities in Hubei, for instance, were sealed off, human movement and traffic prohibited, quarantine imposed on all potentially exposed people, makeshift hospitals quickly built to receive and cure for infected patients. After implementation for just one month, these control measures effectively contained the spread of this highly infectious novel coronavirus in China (4), and were considered therefore highly efficient by the World Health Organization (WHO)(5). As the first wave of the pandemic has passed beyond China, COVID-19 now begins to rage worldwide, sweeping across all continents except Antarctica (6). For effective monitoring and containment of the pandemic, it is crucial to understand the patterns of its rapidly changing and localised transmission and promptly evaluate whether the currently implemented control measures are adequate to 'flatten the curve'.