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

Since data about the actual people contact network inside a city are unavailable, we created contact networks among people within each city following with the homogenous network topology, namely the Erdős-Rényi model (Erdős & Rényi, 1960) . More specifically, nodes inside a city are randomly connected with a predefined probability such that each node has around 15 links (the average node degree is 15). Intercity links are created to simulate the interaction among the cities according to the number of people that traveled between the cities. For example, if the daily population flow from city to city is number of people, number of directed links will be randomly generated between people in city to people in city . Considering the implementation of city lockdown on January 23 rd , we alter the intercity network topology once during the simulation. In the first network topology, links among cities are created based on the average daily population movement between January 1 st -22 nd , while the second network reflects the population movement from January 23 rd -29 th .