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

IATA [5] provides comprehensive air travel data covering more than 12000 airports across the world. Given a source and destination airport, it provides the number of passengers traveling between the two airports as reported by the airlines ("reported PAX") and the IATA estimated ("reported + estimated PAX") per month. The travel details include both direct and multi-hop connections between the airports. In addition, it provides the different carriers serving the two airports, which allow for simulating airline cancellations using historical data. For this analysis, we used data from the month of February 2019. Infectious Disease Vulnerability Index (IDVI) [9] is a metric developed by the RAND Corporation to identify countries potentially most vulnerable to poorly controlled infectious disease outbreaks because of confluence of factors including political, economic, public health, healthcare, demographics, and disease dynamics. Arrival times are curated from the official situation reports [10] published by World Health Organization. Each country is associated with the first date of confirmed case, with China being assigned December 31st, 2019. Airline suspensions information available as on February 10th 2020, by airline and routes was obtained and curated from Bloomberg [11] and other websites 2 .