An Investigation of Containment Measure Implementation and Public Responses to the COVID-19 Pandemic in Mainland China

Abstract

While the COVID-19 epidemic expands among multiple countries, diverse measures have been exploited to halt the spread of COVID-19. In Mainland China, the containment measures can be categorized into two types, i.e., intra-city quarantine and isolation, and inter-city travel restriction. Both information acquisition and local economy play an important role while implementing the measures. In order to understand the relationship between the containment measures and pulic responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, we study the correlation among three factors, i.e., the information acquisition of containment measures, the public responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, and local economy of cities in Mainland China. We combine Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) and SIR-X to estimate the parameters related to the pandemic. Then, we investigate the correlations among multiple representative parameters including mobility, local economy, and information acquisition to understand the implementation of containment measures. We utilize the mobility data from Baidu Maps, the COVID-19 related search frequency data from Baidu Search Engine, and the data of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). From the analysis, we evidence that the the information acquisition is strongly correlated with the local economy. In addition, we find that the cities with stronger local economy have bigger inflows from Wuhan, while the citizens of the cities perform COVID-19- related searches more frequently and take the quarantine measure more strictly.