Spatially Explicit Modeling of 2019-nCoV Epidemic Trend based on Mobile Phone Data in Mainland China

Xiaolin Zhu; Aiyin Zhang; Shuai Xu; Pengfei Jia; Xiaoyue Tan; Jiaqi Tian; Tao Wei; Zhenxian Quan; Jiali Yu

Our predictions of three future scenarios, namely the current trend maintained, control efforts expanded, person-to-person contacts increased due to work resuming, provide information for decision makers to allocate resources for controlling the disease spread. Generally speaking, densely populated cities and cities in central China will face severe pressure to control the epidemic, since the number of infections keeps increasing in all three scenarios in the near future. By comparing predictions of three scenarios, it is obvious that reducing the transmissibility is a critical approach to reduce the daily new infections and controlling the magnitude of epidemics. Fortunately, the latest number of confirmed diagnoses ( Figure 1 ) and our prediction both show the slowing down of new infections in these days, indicating current control measures implemented by Chinese government are effective, including controlling traffic between Wuhan and other regions, isolating suspected patients, canceling mass gatherings, and requiring people to implement protective measures. However, once the Spring Festival travel rush returns as scenario 3 (most provinces planned to resume work on February 9), it will inevitably cause considerable growth in transmissibility and further re-increase of epidemics. In addition, current insufficient supply of protective equipment may exacerbate this situation. Therefore, public health interventions should be performed continuously to obtain the best results of epidemic control. The following measures are recommended to implement continuously in the near future, such as, postponing work resuming, arranging work-from-home, and instructing enterprises to implement epidemic prevention measures. Essentially, all measures are for reducing population mobility and person-to-person contact, and there is no panacea for all conditions, hence interventions in different regions should be adapted according to local epidemics.