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

[12] consider the task of forecasting international and domestic spread of COVID-19 and employ Official Airline Group (OAG) data for determining air traffic to various countries. [6] fit a generalized linear model for observed number of cases in various countries as a function of air traffic volume obtained from OAG data (authors refer to [12] ) to determine countries with potential risk of under-detection. [7] provide Africa-specific case-study of vulnerability and preparedness using data from Civil Aviation Administration of China. In order to determine vulnerability of nations to COVID-19, the popular metric has been IDVI [1, 7] with [7] also employing WHO International Health Regulation Monitoring and Evaluation Framework to determine preparedness. For the current COVID-19 outbreak, [2] provides the relative import risk to various countries estimated using the worldwide air transportation network consisting of 4000 airports, and also an interactive visualization for arbitrary origin airports.