Assessing the impact of reduced travel on exportation dynamics of novel coronavirus infection (COVID-19)

Asami Anzai; Tetsuro Kobayashi; Natalie M. Linton; Ryo Kinoshita; Katsuma Hayashi; Ayako Suzuki; Yichi Yang; Sungmok Jung; Takeshi Miyama; Andrei R. Akhmetzhanov; Hiroshi Nishiura

In modern history, this epidemic is perhaps the first instance where a large city populated with more than 10 million people was placed on lockdown. While countermeasures to prevent epidemic spread require the sort of strong political decisions that resulted in strong movement restrictions, our study indicated that the delay to a major epidemic in countries other than China (using Japan as an example) was unfortunately minimal. While the complete lockdown of Wuhan, Wenzhou, and Shenzhen likely helped reduce case incidence outside of these cities, migration from other cities in China could still contribute to the spread of infection locally and internationally [23] . To quantify the epidemiological impact for the entire course of the epidemic more precisely, a more detailed analysis using dynamic datasets, e.g. airline passenger data, should be explored in the future.