在新发突发传染病的早期阶段,快速应对对于疫情防控至关重要.用于控制疫情的公共假期能为大规模、迅速地进行社会隔离和其他举措提供关键的时间窗口期.本研究的目的是探讨抗疫假期的起始时间节点和持续时间对中国早期新冠病毒肺炎疫情传播的影响.我们开发了一个房室模型来模拟从2020年1月开始中国新冠病毒肺炎疫情的动态传播;预测并比较了春节期间在有抗疫假期和没有抗疫假期下的疫情传播;考虑了抗疫假期在不同持续时间、不同起始时间节点,以及在关于病毒传播率的不同假设下的多种情况;估计了在不同情况下达到某些感染阈值所需的天数延迟.结果表明,中国的抗疫假期使新冠病毒肺炎疫情的传播停滞了许多天.与不设抗疫假期的场景相比,基础场景的抗疫假期(湖北省为21 d,中国所有其他省为10 d)可使确诊感染100000例的时间延迟7.54 d.持续时间更长的抗疫假期会对疫情防控产生更大的影响.为期21 d的全国性抗疫假期可使确诊感染100000例的时间延迟近10 d.此外,研究发现,在新发突发传染病较早阶段实施抗疫假期比较晚阶段实施对遏制疫情蔓延更有效,抗疫假期期间采取额外的控制措施可以增强疫情控制效果.总之,抗疫假期能够通过有效地减少人群的社交接触频率及范围,从而减缓疫情的传播.抗疫假期使得新冠病毒肺炎传播暂时停滞,为疫情防控争取了时间,科学家可用争取的时间来发现传播途径并确定有效的公共卫生干预措施,政府可用争取的时间来完善基础设施、调配医疗用品、培训和部署专业人力资源,从而为长期防控做好准备.
Rapid responses in the early stage of a new epidemic are crucial in outbreak control. Public holidays for outbreak control could provide a critical time window for a rapid rollout of social distancing and other control measures at a large population scale. The objective of our study was to explore the impact of the timing and duration of outbreak-control holidays on the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) epi-demic spread during the early stage in China. We developed a compartment model to simulate the dynamic transmission of COVID-19 in China starting from January 2020. We projected and compared epi-demic trajectories with and without an outbreak-control holiday that started during the Chinese Lunar New Year. We considered multiple scenarios of the outbreak-control holiday with different durations and starting times, and under different assumptions about viral transmission rates. We estimated the delays in days to reach certain thresholds of infections under different scenarios. Our results show that the outbreak-control holiday in China likely stalled the spread of COVID-19 for several days. The base case outbreak-control holiday (21 d for Hubei Province and 10 d for all other provinces) delayed the time to reach 100000 confirmed infections by 7.54 d. A longer outbreak-control holiday would have had stron-ger effects. A nationwide outbreak-control holiday of 21 d would have delayed the time to 100000 con-firmed infections by nearly 10 d. Furthermore, we find that outbreak-control holidays that start earlier in the course of a new epidemic are more effective in stalling epidemic spread than later holidays and that additional control measures during the holidays can boost the holiday effect. In conclusion, an outbreak-control holiday can likely effectively delay the transmission of epidemics that spread through social con-tacts. The temporary delay in the epidemic trajectory buys time, which scientists can use to discover transmission routes and identify effective public health interventions and which governments can use to build physical infrastructure, organize medical supplies, and deploy human resources for long-term epidemic mitigation and control efforts.