Fighting coronavirus at home: Visualizing “slammers” for the extended Spring Festival break in China

Abstract

The beginning of 2020 has seen coronavirus spreading to many countries and regions. To contain the virus, China adopted, arguably, the most stringent quarantine countermeasures in the country’s history concerning restricting people flows, limiting outdoor activities, and extending the Spring Festival break. On the one hand, thousands of doctors and nurses directly fought and are still fighting coronavirus in various medical facilities; on the other hand, millions and even billions of residents and tourists self-quarantined and are still self-quarantining themselves in their homes (or temporary homes), fighting the virus in another manner. Across cities and regions, which have the highest percentage of “fighters” at home? To answer this, we downloaded and processed the publicly available Baidu Qianxi (migration) data for 11 consecutive days in 2019 and 2020. Then we geovisualized the answer. The visual indicates that several cities in Hubei, as expected, had the highest percentage, followed by several cities in Zhejiang Province and several cities in Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region and Hainan Province. In terms of percentage ranking across regions, East China is no.1.