Assessing early heterogeneity in doubling times of the COVID-19 epidemic across prefectures in mainland China, January–February, 2020

Fung IC; Zhou X; Cheung CN; Ofori SK; Muniz-Rodriguez K; Cheung CH; Lai PY; Liu M; Chowell G

Publication

Assessing early heterogeneity in doubling times of the COVID-19 epidemic across prefectures in mainland China, January–February, 2020

Fung IC; Zhou X; Cheung CN; Ofori SK; Muniz-Rodriguez K; Cheung CH; Lai PY; Liu M; Chowell G

Publisher

MDPI AG

Date

2021

Abstract

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