Comparison of spatio-temporal transmission characteristics of COVID-19 and its mitigation strategies in China and the US

doi:10.1007/s11442-020-1822-8

Abstract

Abstract:

Investigating the spatio-temporal transmission features and process of novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) mitigation strategies are of great practical significance to understand the development of COVID-19 and establish international cooperation for prevention and control. In this paper, the cumulative number of confirmed cases, number of confirmed cases per day and cumulative number of deaths, were used to compare transmission paths, outbreaks timelines, and coping strategies of COVID-19 in China and the US. The results revealed that: first, the COVID-19 outbreaks in both China and the US exhibited a 6-week initiation stage. In China, the COVID-19 erupted in late January. It lasted only a short period of time and was almost completely contained within 6-8 weeks. But the COVID-19 erupted in early March in the US and was still in the peak or post-peak stage. Second, in China, the COVID-19 emerged in Wuhan and spread to other regions of Hubei Province and then nationwide, exhibiting a cross(“+”)-shaped of spread with Wuhan city as the center. Importantly, the COVID-19 in China had a large concentration and there were no national outbreaks. In contrast, the COVID-19 in the US first spread through New York and the western and eastern coasts but has since emerged throughout the entire country. Third, the lack of emergency response planning in both countries in the early stage (about 6-week) hampered COVID-19 prevention. However, actively high-pressure prevention and control measures were used to basically control COVID-19 in early March in China. And then China has gradually resumed business and production activities. Unfortunately, the US government missed the best opportunity to contain the epidemic. Faced with the choice between economic recovery and coronavirus containment, the US removed the quarantine and restriction measures too early. The COVID-19 is continuing to spread in the country and blossom everywhere, still showing no signs of receding.

Key words: COVID-19, spatio-temporal transmission, timelines, mitigation strategy, China, the US

FENG Zhiming, XIAO Chiwei, LI Peng, YOU Zhen, YIN Xu, ZHENG Fangyu. Comparison of spatio-temporal transmission characteristics of COVID-19 and its mitigation strategies in China and the US[J].Journal of Geographical Sciences, 2020, 30(12): 1963-1984.

Figures/Tables 10

Figure 1

Figure 2

Figure 3

Figure 4

Figure 5

Figure 6

Figure 7

Table 1

Figure 8

Figure 9

References 39

[1]	Alastair B, Richard H, 2020. A planetary health perspective on COVID-19: A call for papers. The Lancet, 395(10230):1099.
[2]	Andersen K G, Rambaut A, Lipkin W I et al., 2020. The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2. Nature Medicine, 26:450-452. doi: 10.1038/s41591-020-0820-9 pmid: 32284615
[3]	Brooks C P, Antonovics J, Keitt T H, 2008. Spatial and temporal heterogeneity explain disease dynamics in a spatially explicit network mode. The American Naturalist, 172(2):149-159. doi: 10.1086/589451 pmid: 18662121
[4]	Chen N S, Zhou M, Dong X et al., 2020a. Epidemiological and clinical characteristics of 99 cases of 2019 novel coronavirus pneumonia in Wuhan, China: A descriptive study. The Lancet, 395(10223):507-513.
[5]	Chen S M, Yang J T, Yang W Z et al., 2020b. COVID-19 control in China during mass population movements at New Year. The Lancet, 395(10226):764-766.
[6]	Chen T M, Rui J, Wang Q P et al., 2020c. A mathematical model for simulating the phase-based transmissibility of a novel coronavirus. Infectious Diseases of Poverty, 9(1):24. doi: 10.1186/s40249-020-00640-3 pmid: 32111262
[7]	de Wit E, Feldmann F, Cronin J et al., 2020. Prophylactic and therapeutic remdesivir (GS-5734) treatment in the rhesus macaque model of MERS-CoV infection. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 117(12):6771-6776. pmid: 32054787
[8]	Ding L, Cai W, Ding J Q et al. 2020b. An interim review of lessons from the Novel Coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) outbreak in China. Scientia Sinica Vitae, 50(3):247-257. (in Chinese)
[9]	Ding Y, Luo S H, Zheng X Y et al., 2020a. Association between population migration and epidemic control of coronavirus disease 2019. Science China Life Sciences, 63(9):936-939.
[10]	Dong E S, Du H R, Gardner L, 2020. An interactive web-based dashboard to track Covid-19 in real time. The Lancet Infectious Diseases, 20(5):533-534. pmid: 32087114
[11]	Forster P, Forster L, Renfrew C et al., 2020. Phylogenetic network analysis of SARS-CoV-2 genomes. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 117(17):9241-9243. pmid: 32269081
[12]	Franch-Pardo I, Napoletano B M, Rosete-Verges F et al., 2020. Spatial analysis and GIS in the study of COVID-19: A review. Science of the Total Environment, 739:140033.
[13]	Ghinai I, McPherson T D, Hunter J C et al., 2020. First known person-to-person transmission of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) in the USA. The Lancet, 395(10230):1137-1144.
[14]	Gu C L, Zhu J, Sun Y F et al., 2020. The inflection point about COVID-19 may have passed. Science Bulletin, 65(11):865-867. pmid: 32292631
[15]	He J Y, Chen G W, Jiang Y T et al., 2020. Comparative infection modeling and control of COVID-19 transmission patterns in China, South Korea, Italy and Iran. Science of the Total Environment, 747:141447.
[16]	Huang C L, Wang Y M, Li X W et al., 2020a. Clinical features of patients infected with 2019 novel coronavirus in Wuhan, China. The Lancet, 395(10223):497-506.
[17]	Huang E N, Qiao F L, 2020b. A data driven time-dependent transmission rate for tracking an epidemic: A case study of 2019-nCov. Science Bulletin, 65(5):425-427.
[18]	Ippolito G, Hui D S, Ntoumi F et al., 2020. Toning down the 2019-nCoV media hype and restoring hope. The Lancet Respiratory Medicine, 8(3):230-231. pmid: 32146924
[19]	Ji Y P, Ma Z R, Peppelenbosch M P et al., 2020. Potential association between COVID19 mortality and health-care resource availability. The Lancet Global Health, 8(4):e480. pmid: 32109372
[20]	Kupferschmidt K, Cohen J, 2020. Can China’s COVID-19 strategy work elsewhere? Science, 367(6482):1061-1062. doi: 10.1126/science.367.6482.1061 pmid: 32139521
[21]	Lai S J, Ruktanonchai N W, Zhou L C et al., 2020. Effect of non-pharmaceutical interventions to contain COVID-19 in China. Nature, 585: 410-413. doi: 10.1038/s41586-020-2293-x pmid: 32365354
[22]	Li Q, Guan, X H, Wu P et al., 2020a. Early transmission dynamics in Wuhan, China, of novel coronavirus-infected pneumonia. The New England Journal of Medicine, 382:1199-1207. doi: 10.1056/NEJMoa2001316 pmid: 31995857
[23]	Li R Y, Chen B, Zhang T et al., 2020c. Global COVID-19 pandemic demands joint interventions for the suppression of future waves. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117(42):26151-26157.
[24]	Li Z, 2018. Some enlightenment of the American medical insurance system to the current health system reform. China Health Insurance, (5):68-71. (in Chinese)
[25]	Li Z J, Chen Q L, Feng L Z et al., 2020b. Active case finding with case management: The key to tackling the COVID-19 pandemic. The Lancet, 396(10243):63-70. doi: 10.1016/S0140-6736(20)31278-2
[26]	Liu Z, Qian J L, Du Y Y et al., 2020. Multi-level spatial distribution estimation model of the inter-regional migrant population using multi-source spatio-temporal big data: A case study of migrants from Wuhan during the spread of COVID-19. Journal of Geo-information Science, 22(2):147-160.
[27]	National Health Commission of the People’s Republic of China (NHCPRC), 2020. COVID-19 epidemic situation up to 24:00 on March 8th http://www.nhc.gov.cn/xcs/yqtb/202003/f2c83db9f73d4be5be0dc96af731813c.shtml/.
[28]	Shi P, Dong Y Q, Yan H C et al., 2020. Impact of temperature on the dynamics of the COVID-19 outbreak in China. Science of The Total Environment, 728:138890.
[29]	Sun Z B, Zhang, H, Yang, Y F et al., 2020. Impacts of geographic factors and population density on the COVID-19 spreading under the lockdown policies of China. Science of The Total Environment, 746:141347.
[30]	Tian H Y, Liu, Y H, Li, Y G et al., 2020. An investigation of transmission control measures during the first 50 days of the COVID-19 epidemic in China. Science, 368(6491):638-642. pmid: 32234804
[31]	United Nations, 2016. Sustainable Development Goals: 17 Goals to Sustain Our World. New York: United Nations. http://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/sustainable-development-goals/.
[32]	Wang G, Huang E, Qiao F L, 2020. Quantitative evaluation on control measures for an epidemic: A case study of COVID-19. Chinese Science Bulletin, 65(11):1009-1015. (in Chinese)
[33]	Wigginton K R, Boehm A B, 2020. Environmental engineers and scientists have important roles to play in stemming outbreaks and pandemics caused by enveloped viruses. Environmental Science and Technology, 54(7):3736-3739. doi: 10.1021/acs.est.0c01476 pmid: 32207922
[34]	World Health Organization (WHO), 2020. Coronavirus Disease (COVID-2019) Situation Reports. https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019/situation-reports/.
[35]	Wrapp D, Wang N S, Corbett K S, 2020. Cryo-EM structure of the 2019-nCoV spike in the prefusion conformation. Science, 367(6483):1260-1263. doi: 10.1126/science.abb2507 pmid: 32075877
[36]	Xinhua News Agency (XNA), 2020. COVID-19 is urged by the UN Secretary General to do everything possible to contain the outbreak. http://www.xinhuanet.com/2020-02/29/c_1125642849.htm/.
[37]	Yang Z F, Zeng Z Q, Wang K, 2020. Modified SEIR and AI prediction of the epidemics trend of COVID-19 in China under public health interventions. Journal of Thoracic Disease, 12(3):165-174. doi: 10.21037/jtd.2020.02.64 pmid: 32274081
[38]	Zhou C H, Su F Z, Pei T et al., 2020. COVID-19: Challenges to GIS with big data. Geography and Sustainability, 1(1):77-87. doi: 10.1016/j.geosus.2020.03.005
[39]	Zhu N, Zhang D Y, Wang W L et al., 2020. A novel coronavirus from patients with pneumonia in China, 2019. The New England Journal of Medicine, 382:727-733. doi: 10.1056/NEJMoa2001017 pmid: 31978945

China				the US
	Timeline	Interval days	CCC		Timeline	Interval days	CCC
1	2019/12/8	-	1	1	2020/1/22	-	1
10	2020/1/1	25	27	10	2020/2/3	13	11
100	2020/1/18	17	121	100	2020/3/3	29	18
1000	2020/1/25	7	1409	1000	2020/3/11	8	1285
10,000	2020/2/1	7	11,901	10,000	2020/3/19	8	13,748
20,000	2020/2/4	4	23,718	100,000	2020/3/27	8	101,962
40,000	2020/2/10	6	42,372	500,000	2020/4/11	15	526,776
60,000	2020/2/14	4	66,376	1,000,000	2020/4/28	17	1,012,582
80,000	2020/3/2	17	80,177	2,000,000	2020/6/10	43	2,000,464
Active cases	2020/6/20	-	403	Active cases	2020/6/20	-	1,235,657