About this Engineering article

Buying Time for an Effective Epidemic Response: The Impact of a Public Holiday for Outbreak Control on COVID-19 Epidemic Spread by Chen, Simiao; Chen, Qiushi; Yang, Weizhong; Xue, Lan; Liu, Yuanli; Yang, Juntao; Wang, Chen; Bärnighausen, Till is a Engineering article available to read on EtoBox.

Rapid responses in the early stage of a new epidemic are crucial in outbreak control. Public holidays for outbreak control could provide a critical time window for a rapid rollout of social distancing and other control measures at a large population scale. The objective of our study was to explore the impact of the timing and duration of outbreak-control holidays on the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) epidemic spread during the early stage in China. We developed a compartment model to simulate the dynamic transmission of COVID-19 in China starting from January 2020. We projected and compared epidemic trajectories with and without an outbreak-control holiday that started during the Chinese Lunar New Year. We considered multiple scenarios of the outbreak-control holiday with different durations and starting times, and under different assumptions about viral transmission rates. We estimated the delays in days to reach certain thresholds of infections under different scenarios. Our results show that the outbreak-control holiday in China likely stalled the spread of COVID-19 for several days. The base case outbreak-control holiday (21 d for Hubei Province and 10 d for all other prov

Author

Chen, Simiao; Chen, Qiushi; Yang, Weizhong; Xue, Lan; Liu, Yuanli; Yang, Juntao; Wang, Chen; Bärnighausen, Till

Publisher

Elsevier ; Elsevier Limited; Elsevier BV (ISSN 2095-8099)

Published

2020

Language

EN

Field

Engineering (Physical Sciences)