Many cases were also reported in other cities in Hubei province apart from Wuhan, where six of them reported over 1000 cumulative cases by February 1513. Their overstretched health care system exacerbates the concern over delayed reporting of confirmed cases in these cities. To mitigate the effect of such potential measurement errors on our estimates, we re-estimate (2) excluding all cities in Hubei province. The bottom panel of Table 3 reports these estimates. Comparing the IV estimates in columns (4) and (6) between the upper and lower panels, we find that the transmission rates are lower in cities outside Hubei. In the January 19–February 1 sub-sample, one new case leads to 1.483 more cases in the following week, and this is reduced to 0.903 in the February 2–February 29 sub-sample. We also find a similar pattern when comparing the estimates from model B.