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

Some key differences: (a) We use IATA data which contains passenger flow volume between origin-destination airports (including transit points) instead of OAG data (used by [3] ) which contains total number of seats available for a given segment. We believe that origin-destination flows by IATA provides a better estimate of population level exposure, and the likelihood of detecting the first case in a country (rather than at the transit airports), thus serves as a better network on which to compute effective distance (cf. Appendix A). While [1, 4, 8, 12] have used the IATA data for estimating relative risk for COVID-19 spread, this is the first work to show the relationship between the emergence times of COVID-19 using effective distance with actual arrival times for 24 countries. We provide estimated ToA for countries that have not officially reported COVID-19, and provide a way to quantify the effect of ongoing airline suspensions.