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

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

Novel Coronavirus, Middle East Respiratory Syndrome-Coronavirus (MERS-CoV) related to Coronavirus that caused Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) epidemic 10 years ago, was first detected in Saudi Arabia and it has been spreading in other countries since 2012[1]. In December 2019, China noticed few pneumonia cases relating to novel Coronavirus (2019-nCOV). Told case incidence has been increasing dramatically and reached the hundreds, but it is likely to be an under-estimate [2] . The Coronavirus menace has now been spread all over the countries in globe. As of March 24, 2020, there were 372757 confirmed Novel Coronavirus-infected pneumonia (COVID-19) cases in 196 countries of which 16224 death cases were traced out worldwide [3] . This endemic of novel Coronavirus has been caused due to the mobility and interaction of people who moved from one country to another by outbound fights. Therefore, we argue that densely populated countries as well as cities are more likely to be infected with novel Coronavirus because of inbound and outbound flights and other means of transports. It implies that both in-bound and out-bound flights of passengers are significant factors in triggering Coronavirus infection risk in more densely populated countries than in less densely populated countries. However, previous studies did not consider the population density factor while modeling the risk of 2019-nCOV transmission. Recent studies estimates the risk of Coronavirus transmission from the Chinese cities to other destinations [4, 5] . More importantly, Haider et al. (2020) built a risk index using the number of air travelers multiplied by the weight of the number of infected cases. Apart from previous studies, our study can fill the research gap constructing a risk index that takes population density and size, case identification rate, and the number of air travel into account.