Identify which Hubei locations outside Wuhan correspond to multiple December 2019 cases

Determine which of the seven non-Wuhan locations in Hubei Province shown in Annex Figure 3 of the WHO–China joint COVID-19 origins report correspond to multiple December 2019 COVID-19 cases, and ascertain the number of cases at each such location, to correctly allocate case multiplicity in spatial analyses of early case distributions.

Background

The authors incorporate ten additional December 2019 cases reported outside Wuhan but within Hubei Province that are depicted at seven location markers in Annex Figure 1 of the WHO–China joint report. Because the report aggregates some cases at shared locations without specifying which markers correspond to multiple cases, the authors could only place seven additional points, one per location.

Knowing which locations host multiple cases is important for robust spatial statistics, especially for measures sensitive to outliers or spatial weighting, and would refine analyses comparing different centers (e.g., centroid, center-point, mode) and their confidence regions.

References

Following a similar methodology, we manually extracted the seven additional locations shown in annex Fig.~3 of the China-WHO Joint mission report \citep{WHO2021} (there are ten additional cases, but seven locations, and we do not know which location(s) had multiple cases; we therefore only placed seven additional points).

— Confirmation of the centrality of the Huanan market among early COVID-19 cases  (2403.05859 - Débarre et al., 2024) in Data and methods — Data sources