Global trends in air travel: implications for connectivity and resilience to infectious disease threats

Ashleigh R Tuite; Deepit Bhatia; Rahim Moineddin; Isaac Bogoch; Alexander G Watts; Kamran Khan

Warning category is of concern due to the potential for greater exposure to and possible spread of pathogens across regions with less developed health capacity. 5, [19] [20] [21] Furthermore, as the FSI is a composite index aggregating indicators across different sectors (social, economic, and political), countries with the same FSI value could have vulnerabilities across these different dimensions. Mixing of populations coming from . CC-BY-NC 4.0 International license It is made available under a author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. Quantifying a country's ability to detect and respond to infectious disease threats is challenging, as there is a constellation of complex and evolving socioeconomic, political, and environmental factors that contribute to that ability. The FSI and other indices attempt to distill these multidimensional factors into a single metric, which of necessity will be a relatively crude approximation. Unlike other such indices, 12, 13 the FSI is unique because it captures year-to-year changes, allowing us compare changes in each country's Fragility over time. 14 The use of the FSI does come with limitations. The data are also not available for all countries, limiting the scope of the analyses. The classification of countries into 4 categories based on numeric scores, while useful for communicating and understanding the risk levels, may reduce power to detect trends in the data. To address this, we used the continuous FSI score when possible. The data . CC-BY-NC 4.0 International license It is made available under a author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity.