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Dear Editor,rnThe recent outbreak of novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has already become a global-scale epidemic.Since the case from China was reported on Dec 30th, 2019 (Huang et al., 2020;Li et al., 2020), the pathogen was soon identified as a new coronavirus on Jan 7th, 2020 and tentatively named 2019-nCOV (Huang et al., 2020) and later renamed SARS-CoV-2 by the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses.However, strict control measures,including the lockdown of Wuhan city did not take effect until Jan 23rd, by which time several million people have already travelled outside Wuhan for the upcoming Chinese New Year, spreading the disease to other areas of China.For the whole month of February, rigorous prevention and control measures were taken by the Chinese government and the whole country is literally in a lockdown state.The necessity of these strict measures has been questioned both domestically and internationally concerning the devastating effects on the global economy;and there is also severe debate over when these control measures, including travel bans and public gathering bans, should be lifted.However, the effectiveness of these strict control measures has not been systematically evaluated using epidemiological data.In this study, we provided a retrospective modelling-based evaluation of the effectiveness of government control measures on COVID-19 in China, using the public data by the end of February 2020.