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At the beginning of 2020, a suddenly appearing novel coronavirus (COVID-19) rapidly spread around the world. The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in China occurred during the Spring Festival when a large number of migrants traveled between cities, which greatly increased the infection risk of COVID-19 across the country. Financially supported by the Wuhan government, and based on cellphone signaling data from Unicom (a mobile phone carrier) and Baidu location-based data, this paper analyzed the effects that city dwellers, non-commuters, commuters, and people seeking medical services had on the transmission risk of COVID-19 in the early days of the pandemic in Wuhan. The paper also evaluated the effects of the city lockdown policy on the spread of the pandemic outside and inside Wuhan. The results show that although the daily business activities in the South China Seafood Wholesale Market and nearby commuters' travel behaviors concentrated in the Hankou area, a certain proportion of these people were distributed in the Wuchang and Hanyang areas. The areas with relatively high infection risks of COVID-19 were scattered across Wuhan during the early outbreak of the pandemic. The lockdown in Wuhan closed the passageways of external transport at the very beginning, largely decreasing migrant population and effectively preventing the spread of the pandemic to the outside. However, the Wuhan lockdown had little effect on preventing the spread of the pandemic within Wuhan at that time. During this period, a large amount of patients who went to hospitals for medical services were exposed to a high risk of cross-infection without precaution awareness. The pandemic kept dispersing in three towns until the improvement of the capacity of medical treatment, the management of closed communities, the national support to Wuhan, and the implementation of a series of emergency responses at the same time. The findings in this paper reveal the spatiotemporal features of the dispersal of infection risk of COVID-19 and the effects of the prevention and control measures during the early days of the pandemic. The findings were adopted by the Wuhan government to make corresponding policies and could also provide supports to the control of the pandemic in the other regions and countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 pandemic is a major problem facing humanity throughout the world. The rapid and accurate tracking of population flows may therefore be epidemiologically informative. This paper adopts a massive amount of daily population flow data (from January 10 to March 15, 2020) for China obtained from the Baidu Migration platform to analyze the changes of the spatiotemporal patterns and network characteristics in population flow during the pre-outbreak period, outbreak period, and post-peak period. The results show that (1) for temporal characteristics of population flow, the total population flow varies greatly between the three periods, with an overall trend of the pre-outbreak period flow > the post-peak period flow > the outbreak period flow. Impacted by the lockdown measures, the population flow in various provinces plunged drastically and remained low until the post-peak period, at which time it gradually increased. (2) For the spatial pattern, the pattern of population flow is divided by the geographic demarcation line known as the Hu (Heihe-Tengchong) Line, with a high-density interconnected network in the southeast half and a low-density serial-connection network in the northwest half. During the outbreak period, Wuhan city appeared as a hollow region in the population flow network; during the post-peak period, the population flow increased gradually, but it was mainly focused on intra-provincial flow. (3) For the network characteristic changes, during the outbreak period, the gap in the network status between cities at different administrative levels narrowed significantly. Thus, the feasibility of Baidu migration data, comparison with non-epidemic periods, and optimal implications are discussed. This paper mainly described the difference and specific information under non-normal situation compared with existing results under a normal situation, and analyzed the impact mechanism, which can provide a reference for local governments to make policy recommendations for economic recovery in the future under the epidemic period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the early stage of the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan, there was a short run of medical resources, and Sina Weibo, a social media platform in China, built a channel for novel coronavirus pneumonia patients to seek help. Based on the geo-tagging Sina Weibo data from February 3rd to 12th, 2020, this paper analyzes the spatiotemporal distribution of COVID-19 cases in the main urban area of Wuhan and explores the urban spatial features of COVID-19 transmission in Wuhan. The results show that the elderly population accounts for more than half of the total number of Weibo help seekers, and a close correlation between them has also been found in terms of spatial distribution features, which confirms that the elderly population is the group of high-risk and high-prevalence in the COVID-19 outbreak, needing more attention of public health and epidemic prevention policies. On the other hand, the early transmission of COVID-19 in Wuhan could be divide into three phrases: Scattered infection, community spread, and full-scale outbreak. This paper can help to understand the spatial transmission of COVID-19 in Wuhan, so as to propose an effective public health preventive strategy for urban space optimization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]