Communicable disease transmission model for the prevention and control of COVID-19 in Wuhan City, China

ABSTRACT

Epidemic prevention and control strongly affect people's lives in cities, but existing communicable disease models cannot accurately simulate the effects of prevention and control procedures. A city simulation model for the 2019 coronavirus epidemic was developed based on an Agent model for Wuhan, China to model the epidemic transmission process. The model includes the government control measures and the hospital diagnosis and treatment levels during the epidemic with analyses of the infection rates and spatial distributions for various epidemic control measures. The model was also used to model the active anti-epidemic impact of nucleic acid testing after people returned to work. The results show that this modeling method accurately reproduces the spatio-temporal transmission characteristics of the Wuhan epidemic. Thus, this method can be used to evaluate government control measures and to implement diagnosis and treatment plans for decision-making for infectious disease prevention and control. © 2021, Tsinghua University Press. All right reserved.