  The ongoing coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has wreaked havoc
worldwide with millions of lives claimed, human travel restricted, and economic
development halted. Leveraging city-level mobility and case data across
mainland China, our analysis shows that the spatial dissemination of COVID-19
in mainland China can be well explained by the human migration from Wuhan and
there will be very different outcomes if the COVID-19 outbreak occurred in
other cities. For example, the outbreak in Beijing or Guangzhou would result in
a $\sim$90% increase of COVID-19 cases at the end of the Chinese New Year
holiday. After the implementation of a series of control measures, human
mobility had experienced substantial changes toward containing the spread of
COVID-19. Our results also suggest an inequality of economic deprivation as
less developed areas generally suffered more severe economic recession during
the COVID-19. Intuitively, it's anticipated that cities with more confirmed
cases would suffer more economic losses. However, for cities outside of Hubei
province, we don't observe such a phenomenon. Our work has important
implications for the mitigation of disease and the reevaluation of the social
and economic consequences of COVID-19 on our society.
