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

Understanding the impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions on the epidemic dynamics is crucial for decision-makers to take proper actions to contain the COVID-19. Since the beginning of the outbreak, scientists have been actively retrieving the epidemiological characteristics such as the time from infection to illness onset (incubation period) and the time from illness onset to hospital admission or isolation (infectious period) (Chen et al., 2020; Guan et al., 2020; Huang et al., 2020; Linton et al., 2020) . Researchers have used the reported cases during the early stage of the epidemic and predicted the epidemic trajectory, the basic reproductive number 0 from which ranges from 2.2 to 6.6 (Read, Bridgen, Cummings, Ho, & Jewell, 2020; Sanche et al., 2020; Zhao et al., 2020) . Several studies explored the effects of the quarantine of Wuhan (X. Shen, Peng, Guo, Xiao, & Zhang, 2020) , travel restrictions (Chinazzi et al., 2020) , and other non-pharmaceutical intervention strategies (Lai et al., 2020; Zhu et al., 2020) on the future transmission dynamics at different geographical scales.