Estimating Infectious Disease Importation Risk during the 2026 FIFA World Cup
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Background
The 2026 FIFA World Cup will bring an estimated 1–5 million international visitors to 11 US host cities between June 11 and July 19, 2026—the largest tournament in history. Large-scale international gatherings accelerate importation of infectious diseases from diverse source populations. Advance estimation of importation risk is essential for public health preparedness and surveillance prioritization.
Methods
We developed a Poisson importation framework applied to five diseases (dengue fever, influenza, malaria, measles, and pertussis) across the 11 US venue cities. Three nested travel models of increasing resolution were constructed: a baseline model using routine June 2024 arrival data; a World Cup–adjusted model incorporating projected visitor growth factors; and a schedule-driven model routing WC fans to specific cities based on match assignments. WHO incidence and BTS T-100 routing fractions were combined with Monte Carlo uncertainty propagation (5,000 Uniform draws on under-reporting and travel-while-infectious parameters) to yield median importation estimates with 95% uncertainty intervals.
Results
Dengue posed the highest importation risk at most venue cities under the schedule-driven model (median Λ > 10 expected importations from Brazil alone; 95% uncertainty interval 5.9–33.1), robust across the full literature-supported parameter range; Atlanta was the exception, where malaria probability exceeded dengue, driven by direct travel from West and Central African nations. Influenza ranked second at most cities, coinciding with the Southern Hemisphere winter peak. Pertussis showed broad geographic spread but carries the widest relative uncertainty, as the assumed detection rate sits at the upper bound of the literature range. Background tourism accounted for the dominant share of total importation risk; the World Cup fan increment contributed approximately 8.3% of projected arrivals for WC-qualified nations.
Conclusions
This Poisson importation framework, built entirely from publicly available data, provides reproducible importation risk estimates for mass gathering events. The framework extends to additional diseases, cities, and gatherings, offering a transparent baseline complementary to proprietary modeling systems.
