Evolving Epidemiology and Effect of Non-pharmaceutical Interventions on the Epidemic of Coronavirus Disease 2019 in Shenzhen, China

  1. Suli Huang
  2. Zhen Zhang
  3. Yongsheng Wu
  4. Shujiang Mei
  5. Yuan Li
  6. Xu Xie
  7. Xiaojian Liu
  8. Xiujuan Tang
  9. Dongfeng Kong
  10. Xiaoliang Wu
  11. Yu Wu
  12. Lan Wei
  13. Ziquan Lv
  14. Shuyuan Yu
  15. Ying Wen
  16. Guohong Zhou
  17. Tianmu Chen
  18. Tiejian Feng
  19. Xuan Zou

Reviewed by

Read the full article

Discuss this preprint

Start a discussion What are Sciety discussions?

Listed in

Log in to save this article

Abstract

Previous studies have demonstrated the characteristics of patients with 2019 novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19). However, the effect of non-pharmaceutical interventions on the epidemic in Shenzhen, China remains unknown. Individual data of 417 cases were extracted from the epidemiological investigations and the National Infectious Disease Information System between January 1, 2020 and February 29, 2020. On the basis of important interventions, the epidemic was divided into four periods (January 1-15, January 16-22, January 23-February 5 and after February 6). We used a susceptible-exposed-infectious-asymptomatic-recovered model to evaluate the effect of interventions. Results suggested that about 53.7% were imported from Wuhan. The median age was 47 years and 52.8% were women. Severity risk increased with age and associated with male and co-existing disorders. The attack rate peaked in the third period and drastically decreased afterwards across sex, age groups and geographic regions. Children younger than 5 years showed a higher attack rate than those aged of 6~19. The effective reproductive number decreased from 1.44 to 0.05 after the highest level emergency response since January 23. Overall, the non-pharmaceutical interventions have effectively mitigated the COVID-19 outbreak in Shenzhen, China. These findings may facilitate the introduction of public health policies in other countries and regions.

Article activity feed

  1. ScreenIT

    SciScore for 10.1101/2020.05.09.20084202: (What is this?)

    Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

    Table 1: Rigor

    NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.

    Table 2: Resources

    Software and Algorithms
    SentencesResources
    The geographical distributions of daily rates of COVID-19 cases across Shenzhen in the 4 periods were depicted by ArcGIS software version 10.6 (Environmental Systems Research Institute Inc).
    ArcGIS
    suggested: (ArcGIS for Desktop Basic, RRID:SCR_011081)
    The goodness of fitting was assessed by Chi-square (χ2) value using SPSS 21.0 (IBM Corp, Armonk, NY, USA).
    SPSS
    suggested: (SPSS, RRID:SCR_002865)

    Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).

    Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:
    Some limitations of this study need to be addressed. First, the proportion of asymptomatic patients might have been overestimated, since part of the patients might develop symptoms after they were confirmed as COVID-19 cases. Therefore, the serologic studies are warranted to confirm our estimates. Second, the transmissibility of people with no symptom was not clear till now; we set the parameter of transmission rate to be half of the symptomatic patients based on limited previous reports, which might reduce the accuracy of our results. Third, the control measures were evaluated as a whole in this study, and we could not determine the impact of each intervention individually. In summary, the intensive non-pharmaceutical control measures have been implemented to restrain the spread of COVID-19 in Shenzhen, including the early emergency response of Shenzhen authorities and CDCs, early application of designated hospital and centralized isolation places for suspected cases and close contacts, the highest level emergency response in Guangdong, and the strict control measures for community transmission, etc. The epidemic curve and our modeling estimates suggested that the containment efforts implemented since the beginning of January, 2020 were clearly effective in mitigating the transmission of COVID-19, especially for the provincial first-level emergency response of Guangdong. These were encouraging for the combat against global COVID-19 outbreak at the time when no effective drug...

    Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.

    Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.

    Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.

    Results from rtransparent:
    • Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • No protocol registration statement was detected.

    About SciScore

    SciScore is an automated tool that is designed to assist expert reviewers by finding and presenting formulaic information scattered throughout a paper in a standard, easy to digest format. SciScore checks for the presence and correctness of RRIDs (research resource identifiers), and for rigor criteria such as sex and investigator blinding. For details on the theoretical underpinning of rigor criteria and the tools shown here, including references cited, please follow this link.

  2. Version published to 10.1101/2020.05.09.20084202 on medRxiv