The spatial dissemination of COVID-19 and associated socio-economic consequences

Zhang, Yafei; Wang, Lin; Zhu, Jonathan J. H.; Wang, Xiaofan

The ongoing coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has wreaked havoc worldwide with millions of lives claimed, human travel restricted, and economic development halted. Leveraging city-level mobility and case data across mainland China, our analysis shows that the spatial dissemination of COVID-19 in mainland China can be well explained by the human migration from Wuhan and there will be very different outcomes if the COVID-19 outbreak occurred in other cities. For example, the outbreak in Beijing or Guangzhou would result in a $\sim$90% increase of COVID-19 cases at the end of the Chinese New Year holiday. After the implementation of a series of control measures, human mobility had experienced substantial changes toward containing the spread of COVID-19. Our results also suggest an inequality of economic deprivation as less developed areas generally suffered more severe economic recession during the COVID-19. Intuitively, it's anticipated that cities with more confirmed cases would suffer more economic losses. However, for cities outside of Hubei province, we don't observe such a phenomenon. Our work has important implications for the mitigation of disease and the reevaluation of the social and economic consequences of COVID-19 on our society.