Assessing spread risk of Wuhan novel coronavirus within and beyond China, January-April 2020: a travel network-based modelling study

Shengjie Lai; Isaac Bogoch; Nick Ruktanonchai; Alexander Watts; Xin Lu; Weizhong Yang; Hongjie Yu; Kamran Khan; Andrew J Tatem

Moreover, several destination cities ( Figure 5 ) outside of Hubei Province that received high volume of travellers from Wuhan prior to LNY's day may serve as significant secondary cities in the outbreak. Most of these cities have large populations and international airports, highly connected with other regions within and beyond China. The initial imported seed cases likely caused the local community transmission, and further spread the virus into wider geographical ranges following the population flows occurring due to the LNY holiday [19] . Therefore, substantial public health interventions have been immediately applied across the country since LNY, including the cordon sanitaire in several of the most affected cities, cancellation of mass gatherings, reduction of travel and contact rate, as well as the extension of the LNY and school winter holiday, which might mitigate subsequent local establishment of 2019-nCoV introduced by travellers.