The global spread of COVID-19 has led to profound reflection on building a global public health security system. This paper uses the urban data collected during the COVID-19 epidemic in China in 2020 to evaluate the effect of the National Sanitary City (NSC) policy on the prevention and control of that epidemic at different stages. We found that the NSC policy was able to curb the occurrence and transmission of the epidemic the epidemic effectively after controlling a series of factors such as urban characteristics, population mobility and pathogen transmission. Compared with non-NSCs, the NSC...