Modelling the impact of travel restrictions on COVID-19 cases in Hong Kong in early 2020
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Abstract
Background
Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) led to pandemic that affected almost all countries in the world. Many countries have implemented border restriction as a public health measure to limit local outbreak. However, there is inadequate scientific data to support such a practice, especially in the presence of an established local transmission of the disease.
Objective
To apply a metapopulation Susceptible-Exposed-Infectious-Recovered (SEIR) model with inspected migration to investigate the effect of border restriction as a public health measure to limit outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019.
Methods
We apply a modified metapopulation SEIR model with inspected migration with simulating population migration, and incorporating parameters such as efficiency of custom inspection in blocking infected travelers in the model. The population sizes were retrieved from government reports, while the number of COVID-19 patients were retrieved from Hong Kong Department of Health and China Centre for Disease Control (CDC) data. The R 0 was obtained from previous clinical studies.
Results
Complete border closure can help to reduce the cumulative COVID-19 case number and mortality in Hong Kong by 13.99% and 13.98% respectively. To prevent full occupancy of isolation facilities in Hong Kong; effective public health measures to reduce local R 0 to below 1.6 was necessary, apart from having complete border closure.
Conclusions
Early complete travel restriction is effective in reducing cumulative cases and mortality. However, additional anti-COVID-19 measures to reduce local R 0 to below 1.6 are necessary to prevent COVID-19 cases from overwhelming hospital isolation facilities.
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SciScore for 10.1101/2020.10.29.20222190: (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
No key resources detected.
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:The outbreak on Princess Diamond Cruise clearly illustrated the limitation in outbreak control by border restriction solely with no public health intervention. In early 2020, a number of passengers on Princess Diamond Cruise were found to be have COVID-19. Despite there was no further import of COVID-19 cases onto the cruise after the …
SciScore for 10.1101/2020.10.29.20222190: (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
No key resources detected.
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:The outbreak on Princess Diamond Cruise clearly illustrated the limitation in outbreak control by border restriction solely with no public health intervention. In early 2020, a number of passengers on Princess Diamond Cruise were found to be have COVID-19. Despite there was no further import of COVID-19 cases onto the cruise after the immediate quarantine, there was still rapid rise in the number of COVID-19 cases on the cruise. It was believed that insufficient on-board personal protective equipment and inadequate social distancing were the causes of the unfortunate event. To date, of the 3,711 individuals on the cruise, 624 of 3011-tested passengers were diagnosed with COVID-19 (16·7%). Unfortunately, implementation of strict public health measures may not be feasible to combat COVID-19 in many regions. For instance, social distancing may not be feasible due to environmental, economical, cultural or religion reasons, and there may be a shortage of trained personnel and facilities for performing contact tracing and quarantine. In the past few months, multiple regions had exponential rise in COVID-19 cases which caused extreme stress to their local health care system. In Wuhan, which was the epicenter of the COVID-19 outbreak in China, severe shortage in isolation facilities urged urgent construction of multiple temporary hospitals. COVID-19 related mortality in regions with severe outbreak tend to be higher due to relative shortage of medical resources outweigh demand. Advan...
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.
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