Related Experiment Video
Updated: Nov 18, 2025

Quantification and Whole Genome Characterization of SARS-CoV-2 RNA in Wastewater and Air Samples
Published on: June 30, 2023
Network analysis of population flow among major cities and its influence on COVID-19 transmission in China
Jie Liu1, Jingyu Hao1, Yuyu Sun1
1Northeast Forestry University, School of Civil Engineering, 26 Hexing Road, Harbin, China.
Abstract:
Large-scale and diffuse population flow amplifies the localized COVID-19 outbreak into a widespread pandemic. Network analysis provides a new methodology to uncover the topology and evolution of the population flow and understand its influence on the early dynamics of COVID-19 transmission. In this paper, we simulated 42 transmission scenarios to show the distribution of the COVID-19 outbreak across China. We predicted some original (Guangzhou, Shanghai, Shenzhen) had higher total aggregate population outflows than Wuhan, indicating larger spread scopes and faster growth rates of COVID-19 outbreak. We built an importation risk model to identify some major cities (Dongguan and Foshan) with the highest total importation risk values and the highest standard deviations, indicating the core transmission chains (Dongguan-Shenzhen, Foshan-Guangzhou). We built the population flow networks to analyze their Spatio-temporal characteristics and identify the influential sub-groups and spreaders. By removing different influential spreaders, we identified Guangzhou can most influence the network's topological characteristics, and some major cities' degree centrality was significantly decreased. Our findings quantified the effectiveness of travel restrictions on delaying the epidemic growth and limiting the spread scope of COVID-19 in China, which helped better derive the geographical COVID-19 transmission related to population flow networks' structural features.
More Related Videos
Related Concept Videos
Steps in Outbreak Investigation
Causality in Epidemiology
Pareto Chart
The Pareto chart is named after the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, who described the Pareto...
Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms-SNPs
Population Growth
Statistical Methods for Analyzing Epidemiological Data

