Revealing the influence of national public health policies for the outbreak of the SARS-CoV-2 epidemic in Wuhan, China through status dynamic modeling
Authors: Qiu Tianyi , Xiao Han 
Published: March 2020

Background

The epidemic caused by SARS-CoV-2 was first reported in Wuhan, China, and now is spreading worldwide. The Chinese government responded to this epidemic with multiple public health policies including locking down the city of Wuhan, establishing multiple temporary hospitals, and prohibiting public gathering events. Here, we constructed a new real-time status dynamic model of SEIO (MH) to reveal the influence of national public health policies and to model the epidemic in Wuhan.

Methods

A real-time status dynamic model was proposed to model the population of Wuhan in status Susceptible (S), Exposed (E), Infected with symptoms (I), with Medical care (M), and Out of the system (O) daily. Model parameters were fitted according to the daily report of new infections from Jan. 27th, 2020 to Feb. 2nd, 2020. Using the fitted parameters, the epidemic under different conditions was simulated and compared with the current situation.

Finding

According to our study, the first patient is most likely appeared on Nov. 29th, 2019. There had already been 4,153 infected people and 6,536 exposed ones with the basic reproduction numberR0of 2.65 before lockdown, whereasR0dropped to 1.98 for the first 30 days after the lockdown. The peak point is Feb. 17th, 2020 with 24,115 infected people and the end point is Jun. 17th, 2020. In total, 77,453 people will be infected. If lockdown imposed 7 days earlier, the total number of infected people would be 21,508, while delaying the lockdown by 1-6 days would expand the infection scale 1.23 to 4.94 times. A delay for 7 days would make the epidemic finally out of control. Doubling the number of beds in hospitals would decrease the total infections by 28%, and further investment in bed numbers would yield a diminishing return. Last, public gathering events that increased the transmission parameter by 5% in one single day would increase 4,243 infected people eventually.

Interpretation

Our model forecasted that the peak time in Wuhan was Feb. 17th, 2020 and the epidemic in Wuhan is now under control. The outbreak of SARS-CoV-2 is currently a global public health threat for all nations. Multiple countries including South Korea, Japan, Iran, Italy, and the United States are suffering from SARS-CoV-2. Our study, which simulated the epidemic in Wuhan, the first city in the world fighting against SARS-CoV-2, may provide useful guidance for other countries in dealing with similar situations.

Funding

National Natural Science Foundation of China (31900483) and Shanghai Sailing program (19YF1441100).

Research in context

Evidence before this study

The epidemic of SARS-CoV-2 has been currently believed to started from Wuhan, China. The Chinese government started to report the data including infected, cured and dead since Jan 20th, 2020. We searched PubMed and preprint archives for articles published up to Feb 28th, 2020, which contained information about the Wuhan outbreak using the terms of “SARS-CoV-2”, “2019-nCoV”, “COVID-19”, “public health policies”, “coronavirus”, “CoV”, “Wuhan”, “transmission model”, etc. And a number of articles were found to forecast the early dynamics of the SARS-CoV-2 epidemic and clinical characteristics of COVID-19. Several of them mentioned the influence of city lockdown, whereas lacked research focused on revealing the impact of public health policies for the outbreak of SARS-CoV-2 through modeling study.

Added value of this study

As the first study systemically analysis the effect of three major public health policies including 1) lockdown of Wuhan City, 2) construction of temporary hospitals and 3) reduction of crowed gathering events in Wuhan city. The results demonstrated the epidemic in Wuhan from the potential first patient to the end point as well as the influence of public health policies are expected to provide useful guidance for other countries in fighting against the epidemic of SRAS-CoV-2.

Implications of all the available evidence

Available evidence illustrated the human-to-human transmission of SARS-CoV-2, in which the migration of people in China during the epidemic may quickly spread the epidemic to the rest of the nation. These findings also suggested that the lockdown of Wuhan city may slow down the spread of the epidemic in the rest of China.