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

To define daily patterns and the connectivity of population movements at county and prefecture (city) level across mainland China during the LNY holiday and the following three months, we used the aggregated and de-identified daily flow of the users of Baidu, the largest Chinese search engine [10] . Baidu offers location-based service (LBS), based on the global positioning system (GPS), IP address, location of signalling towers and WIFI, for online searching, mapping, and a large variety of apps and software for mobile devices. These data have been used to visualize population migration around Chinese New Year [10] . Two Baidu datasets were used in this study. The first one covers daily movement data at county level from December 1 st , 2013 to April 30 th , 2014, as described elsewhere [11] . We calculated relative . CC-BY-NC 4.0 International license It is made available under a author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity.