The Effect of “Wuhan Closure” on the COVID-19 Pandemic in China

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

In this study, we analyzed daily records of newly diagnosed cases in Wuhan, Hubei excluding Wuhan (HEW), and China excluding Hubei (CEH) to investigate the impact of the new coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan on cities around it and throughout China. We used multifractal detrended cross-correlation analysis (MF-DXA) method to investigate the correlations between the daily number of patients in Wuhan and HEW as well as in Wuhan and CEH. We concluded that the cross-correlations between the daily number of patients in Wuhan and HEW were higher than those between the daily number of patients in Wuhan and CEH because the multifractal features of Wuhan and HEW are greater than those of Wuhan and CEH. We also found that the “Wuhan closure” conducted on January 23 resulted in a decrease in cross-correlations between Wuhan and CEH.