Evaluating the impact of international airline suspensions on the early global spread of COVID-19

Aniruddha Adiga; Srinivasan Venkatramanan; James Schlitt; Akhil Peddireddy; Allan Dickerman; Andrei Bura; Andrew Warren; Brian D Klahn; Chunhong Mao; Dawen Xie; Dustin Machi; Erin Raymond; Fanchao Meng; Golda Barrow; Henning Mortveit; Jiangzhuo Chen; Jim Walke; Joshua Goldstein; Mandy L Wilson; Mark Orr; Przemyslaw Porebski; Pyrros A Telionis; Richard Beckman; Stefan Hoops; Stephen Eubank; Young Yun Baek; Bryan Lewis; Madhav Marathe; Chris Barrett

The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not peer-reviewed) is the . https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.02.20.20025882 doi: medRxiv preprint rival using the updated effective distance. For this process, we use the regression coefficients that were computed using known arrival times. Figures 3b and 3c show the scatter plots of estimated ToA vs. IDVI for the countries before and after the imposition of airline suspensions. The ellipses indicate the σ−confidence interval of the point clouds corresponding to the respective combatant commands. The increase in ellipse widths and mean shift to the right (due to constant IDVI) between Figure 3b and Figure 3c indicate the effect of flight cancellations on estimated ToA. On an average, countries in AFRICOM see the largest average increase in estimated ToA of nearly 11 days, followed by countries in SOUTHCOM showing an average increase of 8 days.