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

To examine how travel between countries belonging to different FSI categories has changed over time, we calculated annual absolute number of outbound passengers between origin-destination FSI category combinations (e.g., total passengers from Alert to Sustainable countries). We also determined the proportionate amount of outbound travel to each destination FSI category for a given origin FSI category. To quantify the change in travel between FSI category combinations, we used a mixed model with random slope and intercept for each origin-destination category pair (such as "Alert to Sustainable"). Using this model, we obtained the yearly change in passenger volume between each category. We log transformed the number of travelers to stabilize the variance and eliminate the skewness. Analyses were conducted in SAS Enterprise Guide 7.1 (SAS Institute, Cary NC) and R. 15 . 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.