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

In order to model the risk due to direct importation, we consider the number of passengers whose trip originated in airport m and ended in airport n (through multiple paths) as obtained from IATA database. This data extracted from IATA is different from the number of available seats between m and n (i.e., the link capacity which could be used by passengers using m → n as a transit) considered in [3] . Hence, the computed effective distances would be different and the difference is explained in Appendix A. We compute the fraction of flows from China to any given countryof-interest and determine its effective distance. We develop a linear estimator for COVID-19 ToA at various countries using the effective distance to China. This allows us to "predict" when COVID-19 is most likely to be reported by various countries. Further, two countries with similar effective distances do not necessarily rank the same in terms of risk of sustained, undetected or uncontrolled epidemic outbreak. In order to capture this aspect, we consider the product of effective distance of a country to its IDVI to rank the countries by risk to COVID-19.