A Tempo-geographic Analysis of Global COVID-19 Epidemic Outside of China

Huipeng Liao; Gifty Marley; Yafei Si; Zaisheng Wang; Yewei Xie; Cheng Wang; Weiming Tang

The first COVID-19 cases in different countries was captured on three maps: 28 th Feb. (the date when WHO first classified the transmission type for affected countries), 7 th Mar., and 14 th Mar. (Figure 3 ). The maps showed that Italy and Iran were the new epidemic centers for exporting COVID-19 as majority of the newly affected countries were close to and reported their first cases originated from the two countries ( Figure 3 and Table S1 ). However, many neighboring countries and territories of Italy were affected and have developed local transmission compared to those of Iran, implying a faster spread of the disease in Europe than the Eastern-Mediterranean Region. For the affected countries in Africa and Latin America, many of them started to report COVID-19 cases in the week of 8 th -14 th Mar., when the disease spread quickly to the world and became a global pandemic. During this period, the first cases reported by the newly affected countries in Latin America and Africa were mainly imported from European countries, especially from Italy and France. The world was in a severe situation of the COVID-19 outbreak.