Spatial epidemic dynamics of the COVID-19 outbreak in China.

On December 31, 2019, an outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China, was reported. The outbreak spread rapidly to other Chinese cities and to multiple countries. We describe the spatio-temporal pattern and measure the spatial association of the early stages of the COVID-19 epidemic in mainland China from January 16 to February 6, 2020.We explored the spatial epidemic dynamics of COVID-19 in mainland China. Moran's I spatial statistic with various definitions of neighbors was used to conduct a test to determine whether a spatial association of the COVID-19 infections existed.We observed the spatial spread of the COVID-19 pandemic in China. The results showed that most of the models, except medical-care-based connection models, indicated a significant spatial association of COVID-19 infections from around January 22, 2020.Spatial analysis is of great help in understanding the spread of infectious diseases, and spatial association is the key to the spatial spread during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic in mainland China.