Impacts of social and economic factors on the transmission of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in China

Yun Qiu; Xi Chen; Wei Shi

Besides Wuhan, a large number of cases are also reported in other cities in Hubei province, where 6 of them reported over 1000 cumulative cases by February 15 11 . Their overstretched health care system exacerbates the concern over delayed reporting of confirmed cases in these cities. To mitigate such potential measurement errors in our estimates, we exclude all cities in Hubei province from the regression. The bottom panel of Table 3 reports the estimates. Comparing the IV estimates in columns (4) and (6), we observe that in the first two weeks, on average, one new case leads to 1.345 more cases in the following week, while the chain of infections is broken in the second half sample. in Wuhan and other cities. To alleviate this concern, we use a measure of the size of population flow from Wuhan to a destination city, which is constructed by multiplying the daily migration index on the population flow out of Wuhan (Figure 2 ) with the share of the flow that a destination city receives provided by Baidu (Figure 3 ). During days before January 25, we use the average destination shares between January 10 and January 24. For days on or after January 24, the average destination shares between January 25 and February 23 are used 12 . Table 4 reports the estimates from IV regressions of Eq.(1), and Table 5 reports the results where we exclude cities in Hubei province from the analysis. Column (4) of Table 4 indicates that in the first half sample, one new case leads to 1.465 more cases within one week, and the effect is not statistically significant between one and two weeks. In the second half sample, one new case actually decreases future number of new cases, which indicates that the responses by the 11 These cities are Xiaogan, Huanggang, Jingzhou, Suizhou, Ezhou, and Xiangyang. 12 The shares of top 100 destinations are available. The starting and ending dates of the average shares released by Baidu do not precisely match the period of the analysis sample.