Since the first case of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in Wuhan Hubei, China, was reported in December 2019, COVID-19 has spread rapidly across the country and overseas. The first case in Anhui, a province of China, was reported on January 10, 2020. In the field of infectious diseases, modeling, evaluating and predicting the rate of disease transmission is very important for epidemic prevention and control. Different intervention measures have been implemented starting from different time nodes in the country and Anhui, the epidemic may be divided into three stages for January 10 to February 11, 2020, namely. We adopted interrupted time series method and develop an SEI/QR model to analyse the data. Our results displayed that the lockdown of Wuhan implemented on January 23, 2020 reduced the contact rate of epidemic transmission in Anhui province by 48.37%, and centralized quarantine management policy for close contacts in Anhui reduced the contact rate by an additional 36.97%. At the same time, the estimated basic reproduction number gradually decreased from the initial 2.9764 to 0.8667 and then to 0.5725. We conclude that the Wuhan lockdown and the centralized quarantine management policy in Anhui played a crucial role in the timely and effective mitigation of the epidemic in Anhui. One merit of this work is the adoption of morbidity data which may reflect the epidemic more accurately and promptly. Our estimated parameters are largely in line with the World Health Organization estimates and previous studies.
Keywords: mathematical model; COVID-19; basic reproduction number; interrupted time series analysis; mitigation; morbidity.