Epidemiology reveals mask wearing by the public is crucial for COVID-19 control

Nianyi Zeng; Zewen Li; Sherrianne Ng; Dingqiang Chen; Hongwei Zhou

doi:10.1016/j.medmic.2020.100015

Epidemiology reveals mask wearing by the public is crucial for COVID-19 control

Med Microecol. 2020 Jun:4:100015. doi: 10.1016/j.medmic.2020.100015. Epub 2020 May 13.

Authors

Nianyi Zeng¹, Zewen Li¹, Sherrianne Ng^{2

3}, Dingqiang Chen¹, Hongwei Zhou¹

Affiliations

¹ Microbiome Medicine Center, Division of Laboratory Medicine, Zhujiang Hospital, Southern Medical University, Guangzhou, Guangdong, China.
² Imperial College Parturition Research Group, Division of the Institute of Reproductive and Developmental Biology, Imperial College London, London, UK.
³ March of Dimes European Prematurity Research Centre, Imperial College London, London, UK.

Abstract

Objective: The pandemic 2019 Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is the greatest concern globally. Here we analyzed the epidemiological features of China, South Korea, Italy and Spain to find out the relationship of major public health events and epidemiological curves.

Study design: In this study we described and analyzed the epidemiological characteristics of COVID-19 in and outside China. We used GAM to generate the epidemiological curves and simulated infection curves with reported incubation period.

Results: The epidemiological curves derived from the GAM suggested that the infection curve can reflect the public health measurements sensitively. Under the massive actions token in China, the infection curve flattened at 23rd of January. While surprisingly, even before Wuhan lockdown and first level response of public emergency in Guangdong and Shanghai, those infection curve came to the reflection point both at 21st of January, which indicated the mask wearing by the public before 21st Jan were the key measure to cut off the transmission. In the countries outside China, infection curves also changed in response to measures, but its rate of decline was much smaller than the curve of China's.

Conclusion: The present analysis comparing the epidemiological curves in China, South Korea, Italy and Spain supports the importance of mask wearing by the public. Analysis of the infection curve helped to clarify the impact of important public health events, evaluate the efficiencies of prevention measures, and showed wearing masks in public resulted in significantly reduced daily infected cases.