Research on the Influence of Effective Distance Between Cities on the Cross-regional Transmission of COVID-19

Shanlang Lin; Yanning Qiao; Junpei Huang; Na Yan

The epidemic of infectious diseases is a complex spreading process that occurs in population. There is a long history of modeling infectious disease epidemics (Anderson et al., 1992) , and various modeling paradigms have been developed. Kermark & Mckendrick (1927) proposed the classic SIR model, which is a compartmental model. Assuming that every individual is the same, the population is homogeneous mixing. The contact is instant and independent of history, infection rate and recovery rate are constant. All people in the same state form a compartment, and as the state changes, personnel move between the compartments. With the growth of urban population and the development of transportation networks, social mobility has increased, and the spatial expansion of infectious diseases has shown a new pattern. Especially when people move between different regions, the spread of infectious diseases is very common. Understanding the impact of human movement patterns on the prevalence of infectious diseases has attracted considerable attention (Gonzalez et al., 2008) , and a meta-population model derived from ecology has been applied in the field of infectious diseases. With the rise of complexity science, the micro-modeling specification has been developed and combined with social networks, a network-based micro-individual modeling method has been developed, which provides a new way to understand the spread of infectious diseases. These models enable epidemiologists and health authorities to understand the transmission process, predict its impact on healthy populations, and assess the After the outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan, most of the research focused on estimating the source, transmission characteristics and the estimation of the scale (Mizumoto et al., 2020; Zhou et al., 2020; Hébert-Dufresne et al., 2020; Fu et al., 2020; Yeo et al., 2020) . In particular, the basic reproduction ratio has been widely debated as a parameter that reflects the speed of virus transmission. Some literatures analyzed the spread of COVID-19 using population migration data, which are calculated based on the migration outflow from Wuhan (Zhan et al., 2020; Ding et al., 2020; Chen et al., 2020) , Little attention has been paid to the spread of the nationwide and even global cities caused by population migration. There is also a literature on how to intervene and control the spread of the COVID-19 virus (Qian et al., 2020; Heymann & Shindo, 2020) ; Gao et al., 2020) .