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Abstract Despite a number of successful approaches in predicting the spatiotemporal patterns of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic and quantifying the effectiveness of non-pharmaceutical interventions starting from data about the initial outbreak location, we lack an intrinsic understanding as outbreak locations shift and evolve. Here, we fill this gap by developing a country distance approach to capture the pandemic’s propagation backbone tree from a complex airline network with multiple and evolving outbreak locations. We apply this approach, which is analogous to the effective resistance in series and parallel circuits, to examine countries’ closeness regarding disease spreading and evaluate the effectiveness of travel restrictions on delaying infections. In particular, we find that 63.2% of travel restrictions implemented as of 1 June 2020 are ineffective. The remaining percentage postponed the disease arrival time by 18.56 days per geographical area and resulted in a total reduction of 13,186,045 infected cases. Our approach enables us to design optimized and coordinated travel restrictions to extend the delay in arrival time and further reduce more infected cases while preserving air travel.
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Evaluating the impact of international airline suspensions on the early global spread of COVID-19
Global airline networks play a key role in the global importation of emerging infectious diseases. Detailed information on air traffic between international airports has been demonstrated to be useful in retrospectively validating and prospectively predicting case emergence in other countries. In this paper, we use a well-established metric known as effective distance on the global air traffic data from IATA to quantify risk of emergence for different countries as a consequence of direct importation from China, and compare it against arrival times for the first 24 countries. Using this model trained on official first reports from WHO, we estimate time of arrival (ToA) for all other countries. We then incorporate data on airline suspensions to recompute the effective distance and assess the effect of such cancellations in delaying the estimated arrival time for all other countries. Finally we use the infectious disease vulnerability indices to explain some of the estimated reporting delays.
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- PAR ID:
- 10213761
- Author(s) / Creator(s):
- ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; more »
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- medRxiv
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.02.20.20025882
