By: JAMA Network

Introduction

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is an emerging respiratory infectious disease caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), which was first detected in early December 2019 in Wuhan, China. As of April 6, 2020, COVID-19 had quickly spread to the majority of countries worldwide, affected more than 1.1 million individuals, and caused nearly 63 000 deaths.1 Although studies have described the clinical characteristics of patients with COVID-19,2-7 and a previous study has reported the early transmission dynamics of the first 425 confirmed cases in Wuhan,8 more recent data are required to illustrate the full spectrum of the epidemiological characteristics of the outbreak in the epicenter.

Several modeling studies have used the international cases exported from Wuhan to extrapolate the severity of the epidemic,9-13 estimating that the Wuhan travel ban delayed the epidemic progression by 3 to 5 days in mainland China,12,13 while reducing case importations to other countries by nearly 80% through mid-February.12 However, to our knowledge, no study has yet comprehensively evaluated the association of various public health interventions implemented by the Chinese government (including but not limited to intensive intracity and intercity traffic restriction, social distancing measures, home isolation and centralized quarantine, and improvement of medical resources; Figure 1) with outbreak control within Wuhan city.

In this study, the epidemiological characteristics of patients with COVID-19 in Wuhan through March 8, 2020, were described, and the rate of confirmed cases and effective reproduction number in different periods according to key events and interventions were compared to evaluate the temporal associations of multiple public health interventions with control of the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan.

Read more: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2764658