Forecasting COVID-19 onset risk and evaluating spatiotemporal variations of the lockdown effect in China

Abstract It is important to forecast the risk of COVID-19 symptom onset and thereby evaluate how effectively the city lockdown measure could reduce this risk. This study is a first comprehensive, high-resolution investigation of spatiotemporal heterogeneities in the effect of the Wuhan lockdown on the risk of COVID-19 symptom onset in all 347 Chinese cities. An extended Weight Kernel Density Estimation model was developed to predict the COVID-19 onset risk under two scenarios (i.e., with and without Wuhan lockdown). The Wuhan lockdown, compared with the scenario without lockdown implementation, delayed the arrival of the COVID-19 onset risk peak for 1-2 days in general and lowered risk peak values among all cities. The decrease of the onset risk attributed to the lockdown was more than 8% in over 40% of Chinese cities, and up to 21.3% in some cities. Lockdown was the most effective in areas with medium risk before lockdown.