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

Our work is an initial attempt at quantifying the impact of airline suspensions on COVID-19 direct importation risk. Some of the limitations of the current work can be overcome with more timely data availability and improved model assumptions. Firstly, the current observations are based on first official reports which in some cases can be quite different from first importations. Also, due to the evolving nature of the outbreak and limited observations, the linear estimator coefficients could change with new reports and altered travel conditions. While air traffic data from IATA allows us to quantify population exposure, (a) it is dated and may not be reflective of current conditions; (b) may not be representative of all human mobility between the countries. As we observed, some countries that are geographically closer to China (e.g., Nepal, Thailand and Japan) have very early arrival times (in relation to estimates based on effective distance). This highlights the need to account for multi-modal transport networks for quantifying the risk of global importations. However, this also raises concerns about other countries and regions (such as Pakistan, Myanmar and Northeastern India) which are geographically adjacent to China but haven't reported any cases yet. Notably, many of these regions scored relatively poorly on the indices of societal function, suggesting ties between the openness of a given regional government and the timeliness and accuracy of their data.