Spill-over effect of Wuhan travel ban on population flow in the outbreak stage of COVID-19 in China.

ABSTRACT

This paper investigates the imppact of COVID-19 travel restrictions on population flow in the People's Republic of China. We discover an "unreasonable" surge in population flow after the Wuhan travel ban. We further find out that such a sure of population flow is attributed to the "spill-over" effect of the Wuhan travel ban. We utilize a logistic regression model to quantify that the spill-over effect linearly decays with the travel distance to the Pandemic center city. Because of the "spill-over" effect of the travel ban policy, government authorities should design redundancy polity to simultaneously implement a travel ban for the pandemic center city and its neighboring cities to restrain human movement and pandemic transmission.