Impacts of social and economic factors on the transmission of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in China

Yun Qiu; Xi Chen; Wei Shi

As multiple nations have implemented mandatary quarantine or even massive lockdown, such as South Korea, Italy and China, and more countries are expected to join as the coronavirus outbreak becomes a global pandemic, examining the influencing factors of the transmission of COVID-19 and the effectiveness of the large-scale quarantine measures in China not only adds to our understanding of the containment of COVID-19 but also provides insights into future prevention work against similar infectious diseases. In this paper, we estimate how the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in a city is influenced by the number of new COVID-19 cases in the same city, other cities, and Wuhan in the preceding first and second weeks, respectively. China's large scale quarantine policy takes effect in late January. We also test whether this policy succeeds in delaying the spread of COVID-19 using a 14-day rolling window analysis between January 19 and February 15.