Country distancing increase reveals the effectiveness of travel restrictions in stopping COVID-19 transmission

  1. Lu Zhong
  2. Mamadou Diagne
  3. Weiping Wang
  4. Jianxi Gao

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Abstract

Despite a number of successful approaches in predicting the spatiotemporal patterns of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic and quantifying the effectiveness of non-pharmaceutical interventions starting from data about the initial outbreak location, we lack an intrinsic understanding as outbreak locations shift and evolve. Here, we fill this gap by developing a country distance approach to capture the pandemic’s propagation backbone tree from a complex airline network with multiple and evolving outbreak locations. We apply this approach, which is analogous to the effective resistance in series and parallel circuits, to examine countries’ closeness regarding disease spreading and evaluate the effectiveness of travel restrictions on delaying infections. In particular, we find that 63.2% of travel restrictions implemented as of 1 June 2020 are ineffective. The remaining percentage postponed the disease arrival time by 18.56 days per geographical area and resulted in a total reduction of 13,186,045 infected cases. Our approach enables us to design optimized and coordinated travel restrictions to extend the delay in arrival time and further reduce more infected cases while preserving air travel.

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  1. Version published to 10.1038/s42005-021-00620-5
  2. ScreenIT

    SciScore for 10.1101/2020.07.24.20160994: (What is this?)

    Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

    Table 1: Rigor

    NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.

    Table 2: Resources

    No key resources detected.

    Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).

    Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:
    Three limitations of this study may underestimate/overestimate the effectiveness of travel restrictions: (1) Incomplete and biased travel restrictions dataset. (2) Homogeneous assumptions on the strengths of different travel restrictions. (3) Ignorance of the combined effect between travel restrictions (international anti-contiguous polices) and local anti-contiguous policy, like social-distancing policy, work from home, and school closure (37, 38). Nevertheless, this study, all the same, provides profound implications that help to stop COVID-19. It offers economical and efficient travel restrictions to slow the spread of COVID-19 while preserving global socioeconomic health. Specifically, it recommends that the outbreak locations should impose the lockdowns as early as possible. The other geographic areas, which are not outbreak location, should impose entry bans to outbreak locations as early as possible, and tailor their entry bans by tracking the changes of outbreak locations. Furthermore, as the pandemic of COVID-19 is more than a health crisis and may last to 2022 (39), geographic areas would continuously endure the coronavirus importation risk from other infected areas and social instability. It is impossible to curb the spread of COVID-19 with travel restrictions imposed by a single area. Thus, this study recommends that the joint global implementation of travel restrictions in a coordinated way as a whole-of-government and whole-of-society approach is necessary to fi...

    Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.

    Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.

    Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.

    Results from rtransparent:
    • Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • No protocol registration statement was detected.

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  3. Version published to 10.1101/2020.07.24.20160994v1 on medRxiv