No Arabic abstract
As the recent COVID-19 outbreak rapidly expands all over the world, various containment measures have been carried out to fight against the COVID-19 pandemic. In Mainland China, the containment measures consist of three types, i.e., Wuhan travel ban, intra-city quarantine and isolation, and inter-city travel restriction. In order to carry out the measures, local economy and information acquisition play an important role. In this paper, we investigate the correlation of local economy and the information acquisition on the execution of containment measures to fight against the COVID-19 pandemic in Mainland China. First, we use a parsimonious model, i.e., SIR-X model, to estimate the parameters, which represent the execution of intra-city quarantine and isolation in major cities of Mainland China. In order to understand the execution of intra-city quarantine and isolation, we analyze the correlation between the representative parameters including local economy, mobility, and information acquisition. To this end, we collect the data of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), the inflows from Wuhan and outflows, and the COVID-19 related search frequency from a widely-used Web mapping service, i.e., Baidu Maps, and Web search engine, i.e., Baidu Search Engine, in Mainland China. Based on the analysis, we confirm the strong correlation between the local economy and the execution of information acquisition in major cities of Mainland China. We further evidence that, although the cities with high GDP per capita attracts bigger inflows from Wuhan, people are more likely to conduct the quarantine measure and to reduce going out to other cities. Finally, the correlation analysis using search data shows that well-informed individuals are likely to carry out containment measures.
The declaration of COVID-19 as a pandemic has largely amplified the spread of related information on social media, such as Twitter, Facebook, and WeChat.Unlike the previous studies which focused on how to detect the misinformation or fake news related toCOVID-19, we investigate how the disease and information co-evolve in the population. We focus onCOVID-19and its information during the period when the disease was widely spread in China, i.e., from January 25th to March 24th, 2020. We first explore how the disease and information co-evolve via the spatial analysis of the two spreading processes. We visualize the geo-location of both disease and information at the province level and find that disease is more geo-localized compared to information. We find a high correlation between the disease and information data, and also people care about the spread only when it comes to their neighborhood. Regard to the content of the information, we find that positive messages are more negatively correlated with the disease compared to negative and neutral messages. Additionally, we introduce machine learning algorithms, i.e., linear regression and random forest, to further predict the number of infected using different disease spatial related and information-related characteristics. We obtain that the disease spatial related characteristics of nearby cities can help to improve the prediction accuracy. Meanwhile, information-related characteristics can also help to improve the prediction performance, but with a delay, i.e., the improvement comes from using, for instance, the number of messages 10 days ago, for disease prediction. The methodology proposed in this paper may shed light on new clues of emerging infections
Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) which is caused by SARS-COV2 has become a pandemic. This disease is highly infectious and potentially fatal, causing a global public health concern. To contain the spread of COVID-19, governments are adopting nationwide interventions, like lockdown, containment and quarantine, restrictions on travel, cancelling social events and extensive testing. To understand the effects of these measures on the control of the epidemic in a data-driven manner, we propose a probabilistic cellular automata (PCA) based modified SEIQR model. The transitions associated with the model is driven by data available on chronology, symptoms, pathogenesis and transmissivity of the virus. By arguing that the lattice-based model captures the features of the dynamics along with the existing fluctuations, we perform rigorous computational analyses of the model to take into account of the spatial dynamics of social distancing measures imposed on the people. Considering the probabilistic behavioural aspects associated with mitigation strategies, we study the model considering factors like population density and testing efficiency. Using the model, we focus on the variability of epidemic dynamics data for different countries and point out the reasons behind these contrasting observations. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to model COVID-19 spread using PCA that gives us both spatial and temporal variations of the infection spread with the insight about the contributions of different infection parameters.
Within a short period of time, COVID-19 grew into a world-wide pandemic. Transmission by pre-symptomatic and asymptomatic viral carriers rendered intervention and containment of the disease extremely challenging. Based on reported infection case studies, we construct an epidemiological model that focuses on transmission around the symptom onset. The model is calibrated against incubation period and pairwise transmission statistics during the initial outbreaks of the pandemic outside Wuhan with minimal non-pharmaceutical interventions. Mathematical treatment of the model yields explicit expressions for the size of latent and pre-symptomatic subpopulations during the exponential growth phase, with the local epidemic growth rate as input. We then explore reduction of the basic reproduction number R_0 through specific disease control measures such as contact tracing, testing, social distancing, wearing masks and sheltering in place. When these measures are implemented in combination, their effects on R_0 multiply. We also compare our model behaviour to the first wave of the COVID-19 spreading in various affected regions and highlight generic and less generic features of the pandemic development.
New York has become one of the worst-affected COVID-19 hotspots and a pandemic epicenter due to the ongoing crisis. This paper identifies the impact of the pandemic and the effectiveness of government policies on human mobility by analyzing multiple datasets available at both macro and micro levels for the New York City. Using data sources related to population density, aggregated population mobility, public rail transit use, vehicle use, hotspot and non-hotspot movement patterns, and human activity agglomeration, we analyzed the inter-borough and intra-borough moment for New York City by aggregating the data at the borough level. We also assessed the internodal population movement amongst hotspot and non-hotspot points of interest for the month of March and April 2020. Results indicate a drop of about 80% in peoples mobility in the city, beginning in mid-March. The movement to and from Manhattan showed the most disruption for both public transit and road traffic. The city saw its first case on March 1, 2020, but disruptions in mobility can be seen only after the second week of March when the shelter in place orders was put in effect. Owing to people working from home and adhering to stay-at-home orders, Manhattan saw the largest disruption to both inter- and intra-borough movement. But the risk of spread of infection in Manhattan turned out to be high because of higher hotspot-linked movements. The stay-at-home restrictions also led to an increased population density in Brooklyn and Queens as people were not commuting to Manhattan. Insights obtained from this study would help policymakers better understand human behavior and their response to the news and governmental policies.
To contain the pandemic of coronavirus (COVID-19) in Mainland China, the authorities have put in place a series of measures, including quarantines, social distancing, and travel restrictions. While these strategies have effectively dealt with the critical situations of outbreaks, the combination of the pandemic and mobility controls has slowed Chinas economic growth, resulting in the first quarterly decline of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) since GDP began to be calculated, in 1992. To characterize the potential shrinkage of the domestic economy, from the perspective of mobility, we propose two new economic indicators: the New Venues Created (NVC) and the Volumes of Visits to Venue (V^3), as the complementary measures to domestic investments and consumption activities, using the data of Baidu Maps. The historical records of these two indicators demonstrated strong correlations with the past figures of Chinese GDP, while the status quo has dramatically changed this year, due to the pandemic. We hereby presented a quantitative analysis to project the impact of the pandemic on economies, using the recent trends of NVC and V^3. We found that the most affected sectors would be travel-dependent businesses, such as hotels, educational institutes, and public transportation, while the sectors that are mandatory to human life, such as workplaces, residential areas, restaurants, and shopping sites, have been recovering rapidly. Analysis at the provincial level showed that the self-sufficient and self-sustainable economic regions, with internal supplies, production, and consumption, have recovered faster than those regions relying on global supply chains.