Short-term forecasts and long-term mitigation evaluations for the COVID-19 epidemic in Hubei Province, China

Qihui Yang; Chunlin Yi; Aram Vajdi; Lee W Cohnstaedt; Hongyu Wu; Xiaolong Guo; Caterina M Scoglio

The 2019 novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) emerged in Wuhan City, Hubei Province of China, in the late fall of 2019 (Chen et al., 2020) . The highly contagious virus outbreak during the Chinese Spring festival period made containment an unprecedented challenge. The risks of human-to-human transmission, long persistence on surfaces, and asymptomatic infections increased spread and made case detection difficult (Chan et al., 2020; Rothe et al., 2020) . Increasing case reports saturated hospitals in Hubei Province, overwhelming medical resources. Despite the high case reports, the true infection rate was likely underreported, as infected individuals with only mild symptoms might have recovered without being detected Sanche et al., 2020) .