Synchronized travel restrictions across cities can be effective in COVID-19 control

Haiyan Liu; Xuemei Bai; Huanfeng Shen; Xiaoping Pang; Zeyu Liang; Yue Liu

show in the early stage of epidemic development it is the inter-city mobility -including from Wuhan, from Hubei excluding Wuhan, and from other cities outside Hubei -that promotes the spatial spread of the coronavirus. During the implementation of local travel bans, the inter-city population movement was more strictly restricted than the intra-city traveling, which limited the further spatial spread of coronavirus in Stage Two. The intra-city travel bans cause the intra-city population movement from 31 January-13 February (after the public holiday of the spring festival) to decrease to 50.1% of that in the previous year (Fig. 2c) , ranging from 23.7-87.8% across cities. For these cities, the inter-city population movement on average decreased to 15.8% of that in the previous year (Fig. 2c) , ranging from 2.8-55.7%. After the quarantine of the whole Hubei and the prohibition of inter-city transport, the importance of restricting the intra-city . CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license It is made available under a author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity.