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

The feasibility of enhancing model capacity to assess transmission risk and evaluating intervention effectiveness has also been substantially increased due to the improvement of the quality of the data, specially from other Chinese cities and provinces where the complete lock-down of major cities such as Wuhan in the Hubei province has prevented a significant portion of infection importation, so the reduction of imported cases coupled with intensive contact tracing produced some high quality data with rather complete information on symptom onset time and transmission-chain, as will be discussed in the data section below. This enhanced model capacity for near-casting is particularly important, since the gradually relaxing of the travel restriction demands proactive-and real-time assessment of the risk of a potential second outbreak in other Chinese cities. An objective of our study is to provide this assessment, and to use this assessment along with the incorporation of feasible public health interventions into our stochastic disease transmission model to suggest the scale of interventions for these cities to prevent a second outbreak. As COVID-19 spread has occurred in many regions globally, we believe our study provides an important tool to inform public health decisions regarding travel restriction and social distancing in these regions according to their public health capacity to maintain an effective contact tracing, quarantine and isolation procedure.