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

For a select set of countries, we compute their effective distance with and without airline suspensions and subsequently, the estimated ToA for each case. The top 20 countries as per the change in estimated ToA after suspension are presented in Figure 3a . Since our network alteration ensures monotonicity after flow volume reduction, we observe that a decrease in flow volumes results in increased estimate for ToA across all countries. We observe that most countries (Figure 3a) , on an average, see an increase in estimated arrival time of ≈ 4 − 5 days, while, Ethiopia and Qatar observe an increase > 10 days.