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It is important to forecast the risk of COVID-19 symptom onset and thereby evaluate how effectively the city lockdown measure could reduce this risk. This study is a first comprehensive, high-resolution investigation of spatiotemporal heterogeneities on the effect of the Wuhan lockdown on the risk of COVID-19 symptom onset in all 347 Chinese cities. An extended Weight Kernel Density Estimation model was developed to predict the COVID-19 onset risk under two scenarios (i.e., with and without the Wuhan lockdown). The Wuhan lockdown, compared with the scenario without lockdown implementation, in general, delayed the arrival of the COVID-19 onset risk peak for 1-2 days and lowered risk peak values among all cities. The decrease of the onset risk attributed to the lockdown was more than 8% in over 40% of Chinese cities, and up to 21.3% in some cities. Lockdown was the most effective in areas with medium risk before lockdown.

It is important to forecast the risk of COVID-19 symptom onset and thereby evaluate how effectively the city lockdown measure could reduce this risk. This study is a first comprehensive, high-resolution investigation of spatiotemporal heterogeneities on the effect of the Wuhan lockdown on the risk of COVID-19 symptom onset in all 347 Chinese cities. An extended Weight Kernel Density Estimation model was developed to predict the COVID-19 onset risk under two scenarios (i.e., with and without the Wuhan lockdown). The Wuhan lockdown, compared with the scenario without lockdown implementation, in general, delayed the arrival of the COVID-19 onset risk peak for 1–2 days and lowered risk peak values among all cities. The decrease of the onset risk attributed to the lockdown was more than 8% in over 40% of Chinese cities, and up to 21.3% in some cities. Lockdown was the most effective in areas with medium risk before lockdown., Wenzhong Shi et al. propose an extended Weight Kernel Density Estimation model to predict the COVID-19 onset risk, with and without the Wuhan lockdown, and corresponding symptom onset and spatial heterogeneity in 347 Chinese cities. The authors find that the lockdown delayed COVID-19 peak onset by 1–2 days and decreased onset risk by up to 21%.