Epidemiological Study and Clinical Characterization of COVID-19 Cases in Xuzhou, China
Abstract
In this paper, an epidemiological study was performed by focusing on all confirmed patients with COVID-19 in Xuzhou, a prefecture-level city, and a transportation hub with 10.44 million population in the east region of China. The median age of the patients is 42-year-old and 45.57% are male; 25 cases (31.65%) are imported. 23 cases (29.11%) were confirmed between January 26 to 31, 2020 while 56 cases (70.89%) were from February 1 to 16, 2020. Among the ten administrative divisions of Xuzhou city,Suining county (n=31) and Pizhou City (n=15) have the most cases while Tongshan district has none. A representative familial cluster with 6 cases was analyzed in detail in order to get a better understanding of the transmission routes of the virus. Furthermore, we performed a retrospective, single-centre study of 41 COVID-19 patients at Xuzhou Infectious Diseases Hospital in terms of clinical findings, which provided an insightful understanding of the disease.
Fig. 1. Schematic illustration of geographic distribution, case composition, and clusters of all COVID19 cases in Xuzhou, China. (a) These cases were unevenly distributed in 10 ad-ministrative divisions. The top three divisions are Suining County (n=31), Pizhou City (n=15), and Jiawang District (n=7) while the bottom two divisions are Tongshan District (n=0) and Xinyi City (n=2). Red numbers in parenthesis indicate the number of imported cases. (b) Composition of imported and locally transmitted cases in terms of resident popu-lation in each administrative division. (c) 11 known clusters and the corresponding connec-tions among COVID19 cases in Xuzhou. All imported cases are in light green dots with an uppercase letter I. HB: Hubei province. Star symbol: Wuhan city. Note: It should be men-tioned that, although there were a total of 79 COVID-19 cases reported in Xuzhou during the pandemic, only 78 of them were included in the study for geographical epidemiological analysis because one COVID-19 patient was actually a train passenger and did not belong to any administrative division of Xuzhou City.Fig. 2. Interurban population migration from (a) Wuhan city or (b) Hubei province to other cities in China from the start of Spring Festival travel rush on January 10, 2010 to the lockdown of Wuhan on January 24, 2020. The number of confirmed cases is linearly related with the percentage of immigrant population from Wuhan city (R2=0.9332), but not from Hubei province (R2=0.4825).
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