Population movement, city closure and spatial transmission of the 2019-nCoV infection in China

Siqi Ai; Guanghu Zhu; Fei Tian; Huan Li; Yuan Gao; Yinglin Wu; Qiyong Liu; Hualiang Lin

Considering the person-to-person transmission and the large travel volume during 44 the traditional Chinese New Year (the largest annual population movement in the 45 world), it is expected that the population movement would lead to further expansion 46 of the infection, so the government imposed a lockdown on Wuhan City at 10:00 am 47 on January 23, as well as some other cities later on. However, an estimated 5 million 48 individuals had already left Wuhan for the holiday or travelling, some of which rushed 49 out after the lockdown announcement (5). In addition, the novel coronavirus is 50 infectious during the incubation period and when the symptoms are not obvious, 51 which is likely to make the huge floating population potential sources of infection (6). 52 Therefore, it is reasonable to hypothesize that the population transported from Wuhan 53 may have a significant impact on the potential outbreaks in other parts of China. 54 Recent studies on the novel coronavirus pneumonia focused more on its etiology (7, 55 8), transmission route (9, 10), and epidemiological characteristics (11, 12), there is 56 still a lack of investigating the relationship between the migrating population and the 57 outbreak, which is of great importance for making intervention policies. Thus, we 58 conducted this study with the following objectives: 1) to depict the impacts of the 59 . 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.