Evaluation of the potential incidence of COVID-19 and effectiveness of contention measures in Spain: a data-driven approach

Alberto Aleta; Yamir Moreno

Furthermore, given that the epidemic started abroad, it is important to determine in which province the disease is more likely to be seeded first. Given the current global spread and incidence of the epidemic, we thus take into account that the three countries with more cases are China, South Korea and Italy and consider that the most plausible route for an infected individual to reach Spain is by plane. Thus, we collected the number of passengers coming from each country to each Spanish airport in 2019 from the Spanish air navigation manager AENA [12] . Then, we assigned each Spanish airport to its corresponding province and ranked them according to their total number of operations with each country, see figure 2. It is worth noticing that the information provided by AENA is already aggregated by country. Thus, this ranking cannot take into account which airports are mostly connected to locations where the outbreak is currently concentrated − e.g., north of Italy. Nevertheless, the ranking constitutes a valid proxy, and a good starting point, to seed the disease.