The effect of control strategies that reduce social mixing on outcomes of the COVID-19 epidemic in Wuhan, China

Kiesha Prem; Yang Liu; Tim Russell; Adam J Kucharski; Rosalind M Eggo; Nicholas Davies; Mark Jit; Petra Klepac

The SARS-CoV-2, a novel coronavirus, emerged in the City of Wuhan, Hubei Province, China, in early Person-to-person transmission is mostly driven by "who interacts with whom", 9,10 which can vary by age and location of the contact i.e., school, work, home, and community. Under the context of a largescale on-going outbreak, contact patterns would drastically shift from their baseline conditions. In the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan, social distancing measures including but not limited to school and workplace closures and health promotions that encourage the general public to avoid crowded places are designed to drastically shift social mixing patterns and are often used in epidemic settings. 4 While contact patterns can be inferred from reported social contact data that include the information in which setting the contact took place, such studies are often focused on high-income countries, 11 or particular high-density areas. 12 Prem and colleagues 13 address that limitation by quantifying contact patterns in the home, school, work and other locations across a range of countries based on available information from household-level data and local population demographic structure.