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Assessing Early Heterogeneity in Doubling Times of the COVID-19 Epidemic across Prefectures in Mainland China, January–February, 2020

To describe the geographical heterogeneity of COVID-19 across prefectures in mainland China, we estimated doubling times from daily time series of the cumulative case count between 24 January and 24 February 2020. We analyzed the prefecture-level COVID-19 case burden using linear regression models a...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Fung, Isaac Chun-Hai, Zhou, Xiaolu, Cheung, Chi-Ngai, Ofori, Sylvia K., Muniz-Rodriguez, Kamalich, Cheung, Chi-Hin, Lai, Po-Ying, Liu, Manyun, Chowell, Gerardo
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: MDPI 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9620948/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36417193
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/epidemiologia2010009
Descripción
Sumario:To describe the geographical heterogeneity of COVID-19 across prefectures in mainland China, we estimated doubling times from daily time series of the cumulative case count between 24 January and 24 February 2020. We analyzed the prefecture-level COVID-19 case burden using linear regression models and used the local Moran’s I to test for spatial autocorrelation and clustering. Four hundred prefectures (~98% population) had at least one COVID-19 case and 39 prefectures had zero cases by 24 February 2020. Excluding Wuhan and those prefectures where there was only one case or none, 76 (17.3% of 439) prefectures had an arithmetic mean of the epidemic doubling time <2 d. Low-population prefectures had a higher per capita cumulative incidence than high-population prefectures during the study period. An increase in population size was associated with a very small reduction in the mean doubling time (−0.012, 95% CI, −0.017, −0.006) where the cumulative case count doubled ≥3 times. Spatial analysis revealed high case count clusters in Hubei and Heilongjiang and fast epidemic growth in several metropolitan areas by mid-February 2020. Prefectures in Hubei and neighboring provinces and several metropolitan areas in coastal and northeastern China experienced rapid growth with cumulative case count doubling multiple times with a small mean doubling time.