Assessing Early Heterogeneity in Doubling Times of the Covid-19 Epidemic Across Prefectures in Mainland China, January-February, 2020

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

3-11-2021

Publication Title

Epidemiologia

DOI

10.3390/epidemiologia2010009

ISSN

2673-3986

Abstract

To describe the geographical heterogeneity of COVID-19 across prefectures in mainland China, we estimated doubling times from daily time series of the cumulative case count between 24 January and 24 February 2020. We analyzed the prefecture-level COVID-19 case burden using linear regression models and used the local Moran’s I to test for spatial autocorrelation and clustering. Four hundred prefectures (~98% population) had at least one COVID-19 case and 39 prefectures had zero cases by 24 February 2020. Excluding Wuhan and those prefectures where there was only one case or none, 76 (17.3% of 439) prefectures had an arithmetic mean of the epidemic doubling time(−0.012, 95% CI, −0.017, −0.006) where the cumulative case count doubled ≥3 times. Spatial analysis revealed high case count clusters in Hubei and Heilongjiang and fast epidemic growth in several metropolitan areas by mid-February 2020. Prefectures in Hubei and neighboring provinces and several metropolitan areas in coastal and northeastern China experienced rapid growth with cumulative case count doubling multiple times with a small mean doubling time.

Comments

This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited

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