Potential for global spread of a novel coronavirus from China

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Abstract
A novel coronavirus emerging from Wuhan, China in late December 2019 is currently spreading to other provinces in mainland China and international destinations across East Asia. At the time of writing, cases have been confirmed in Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Macau and multiple cities in Guangdong province, with more than 500 cases confirmed across China.1 Furthermore, several cases have spread internationally via air travel2 to Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand and the USA. A recent modelling study concluded that for these international exportations to be observed, the outbreak in China should be substantially larger than is reflected by confirmed case counts.3 Currently, many public health interventions are based on scenarios where Wuhan is the primary source of new cases.4 While there are currently no documented transmission chains outside of the Wuhan region, should a scenario arise where this novel coronavirus spreads more broadly to and within other Chinese cities, we evaluated how global patterns of disease dispersion might change.