Evaluating the impact of international airline suspensions on the early global spread of COVID-19
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Abstract
Global airline networks play a key role in the global importation of emerging infectious diseases. Detailed information on air traffic between international airports has been demonstrated to be useful in retrospectively validating and prospectively predicting case emergence in other countries. In this paper, we use a well-established metric known as effective distance on the global air traffic data from IATA to quantify risk of emergence for different countries as a consequence of direct importation from China, and compare it against arrival times for the first 24 countries. Using this model trained on official first reports from WHO, we estimate time of arrival (ToA) for all other countries. We then incorporate data on airline suspensions to recompute the effective distance and assess the effect of such cancellations in delaying the estimated arrival time for all other countries. Finally we use the infectious disease vulnerability indices to explain some of the estimated reporting delays.
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SciScore for 10.1101/2020.02.20.20025882: (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:Some of the limitations of the current work can be overcome with more timely data availability and improved model assumptions. Firstly, the current observations are based on first official reports which in some cases can be quite different from first importations. Also, due to the evolving nature of the outbreak and limited observations, …
SciScore for 10.1101/2020.02.20.20025882: (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:Some of the limitations of the current work can be overcome with more timely data availability and improved model assumptions. Firstly, the current observations are based on first official reports which in some cases can be quite different from first importations. Also, due to the evolving nature of the outbreak and limited observations, the linear estimator coefficients could change with new reports and altered travel conditions. While air traffic data from IATA allows us to quantify population exposure, (a) it is dated and may not be reflective of current conditions; (b) may not be representative of all human mobility between the countries. As we observed, some countries that are geographically closer to China (e.g., Nepal, Thailand and Japan) have very early arrival times (in relation to estimates based on effective distance). This highlights the need to account for multi-modal transport networks for quantifying the risk of global importations. However, this also raises concerns about other countries and regions (such as Pakistan, Myanmar and Northeastern India) which are geographically adjacent to China but haven’t reported any cases yet. Notably, many of these regions scored relatively poorly on the indices of societal function, suggesting ties between the openness of a given regional government and the timeliness and accuracy of their data. Finally, we have considered China as a single origin, while there exists case counts by province. The current analysis can be exten...
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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