Severe airport sanitarian control could slow down the spreading of COVID-19 pandemics in Brazil

Servio Pontes Ribeiro; Wesley Dattilo; Alcides Castro e Silva; Alexandre Barbosa Reis; Aristoteles Goes-Neto; Luiz Alcantara; Marta Giovanetti; Wendel Coura-vital; Geraldo Wilson Fernandes; Vasco Ariston Azevedo

mic 59 spreading of coronavirus (Hellewell et al. 2020 ), since the main form of transmission is 60 direct contact between people or by contact with fomite, mainly in closed environments, 61 such as classrooms, offices, etc. (Rothe et al., 2019; Bedford et al., 2020). Regardless 62 of virulence, for a highly contagious virus such as SARS-CoV-2, the occurrence of the 63 first case in a nation will result in a strongly and nearly uncontrollable exponential 64 growth curve, depending only on the number of encounters between infected and 65 susceptible people, and fuelled by a high H0 (the number of people one infected person 66 will infect). 67 On the other hand, the dynamics of disease spreading among cities are entirely 68 distinct. In this work, we present an epidemiological model describing the free entrance 69 of people coming from two highly infected countries with close links to Brazil: Italy and 70 Spain. We showed how SARS-CoV-2 spreads into the Brazilian cities by the 71 international airports, and then to other, less internationally connected cities, through 72 the Brazilian airport network. For exploring the dynamics of a continent size, nationwide 73 spreading of SARS-CoV-2, as it is the case of Brazil, we assumed cities connected by 74 airports formed a metapopulation structure. 75 Each person in a city was taken as a component of a superorganism, i.e., an 76 interdependent entity where living individuals are not biologically independent between 77 them in various subtle ways. By doing so, we dealt with cities as the sampling units, not 78 the people. Flights coming from foreign countries with COVID-19 (namely Spain and All rights reserved. No reuse allowed without permission.