Effect of non-pharmaceutical interventions to contain COVID-19 in China
Shengjie Lai, Nick W. Ruktanonchai, Liangcai Zhou, Olivia Prosper, Wei Luo, Jessica R. Floyd, Amy Wesolowski, Mauricio Santillana, Chi Zhang, Xiangjun Du, Hongjie Yu & Andrew J. Tatem
Nature (2020)
Abstract
On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic1. The outbreak containment strategies in China based on non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) appear to be effective2, but quantitative research is still needed to assess the efficacy of NPIs and their timings3. Using epidemiological and anonymised human movement data4,5, here we develop a modelling framework that uses daily travel networks to simulate different outbreak and intervention scenarios across China. We estimated that there were a total of 114,325 COVID-19 cases (interquartile range 76,776 - 164,576) in mainland China as of February 29, 2020. Without NPIs, the COVID-19 cases would likely have shown a 67-fold increase (interquartile range 44 - 94) by February 29, 2020, with the effectiveness of different interventions varying.
