A Short-Term Prediction Model at the Early Stage of the COVID-19 Pandemic Based on Multisource Urban Data

The ongoing coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic spread throughout China and worldwide since it was reported in Wuhan city, China in December 2019. 4 589 526 confirmed cases have been caused by the pandemic of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), by May 18, 2020. At the early stage of the pandemic, the large-scale mobility of humans accelerated the spread of the pandemic. Rapidly and accurately tracking the population inflow from Wuhan and other cities in Hubei province is especially critical to assess the potential for sustained pandemic transmission in new areas. In this study, we first analyze the impact of related multisource urban data (such as local temperature, relative humidity, air quality, and inflow rate from Hubei province) on daily new confirmed cases at the early stage of the local pandemic transmission. The results show that the early trend of COVID-19 can be explained well by human mobility from Hubei province around the Chinese Lunar New Year. Different from the commonly-used pandemic models based on transmission dynamics, we propose a simple but effective short-term prediction model for COVID-19 cases, considering the human mobility from Hubei province to the target cities. The performance of our proposed model is validated by several major cities in Guangdong province. For cities like Shenzhen and Guangzhou with frequent population flow per day, the values of [Formula: see text] of daily prediction achieve 0.988 and 0.985. The proposed model has provided a reference for decision support of pandemic prevention and control in Shenzhen.