Stochastic discrete epidemic modeling of COVID-19 transmission in the Province of Shaanxi incorporating public health intervention and case importation

Sanyi Tang; Biao Tang; Nicola Luigi Bragazzi; Fan Xia; Tangjuan Li; Sha He; Pengyu Ren; Xia Wang; Zhihang Peng; Yanni Xiao; Jianhong Wu

Since January 23 rd 2020, the Chinese authorities have been implementing unprecedented and increasingly stringent public health interventions, including a complete lock-down of Wuhan and neighboring cities, strict contact tracing and travel restrictions in the epicenter and across the country [13] . Incorporating these interventions into the classical epidemic models has resulted in reliable estimates of epidemiological characteristics of COVID-19 transmission in the epicenter and accurate near-casting the epidemic trend and peak time [18] [19] [20] , in comparison with other earlier modeling studies focusing on analyzing the transmission risk based on data at the early outbreak stage [1, 3, 4, 17] . One important lesson gained from our recent experience suggests the need of updating the model parameters and model setting to reflect the rapid improvement of screening, diagnosing and testing techniques/procedures, accompanied by intensive contact tracing, quarantine and isolation.