Modeling risk of infectious diseases: a case of Coronavirus outbreak in four countries

Md. Mazharul Islam; Md. Monirul Islam; Md. Jamal Hossain; Faroque Ahmed

Data on Coronavirus identified cases, population size and density, and air travel among areas of the four countries -US, Canada, Australia and China are collected from three different sources. First, the total number of confirmed cases (up to 26 March 2020) and the dates of first identification of Coronavirus cases in geographic areas (territory/province/state) are extracted from Johns Hopkins University Center for Systems Science and Engineering (JHU CCSE) (https://systems.jhu.edu/research/public-health/ncov/) [13, 14] . Second, data on population size and geometric area are collected from the website https://www.citypopulation.de. Finally, because of insufficient passengers' travel data, we incorporate air travel data only among these areas. Air travel data are obtained from FLIRT (https://flirt.eha.io), a flight network analysis tool developed by EcoHealth Alliance which provides simulated passengers' data for the final destination from different airports based on flight schedule database of 800 airlines [12, 15] .