Quantifying COVID-19 importation risk in a dynamic network of domestic cities and international countries
Han, Xiaoyi; Xu, Yilan; Fan, Linlin; Huang, Yi; Xu, Minhong; Gao, Song
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA Year: 2021 Volume: 118.0
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2100201118
Abstract: Significance In the COVID-19 pandemic, countries need to manage both the domestic spread and the spread of the virus from foreign countries, with their relative urgency varying over time. Based on a dynamic network of cities and countries connected by travel flows, we demonstrate that imported cases would have a limited effect on a country’s confirmed cases if domestic transmission mechanisms had been muted or significantly weakened. However, uncontrolled domestic disease transmission can fuel the spread from abroad to domestic. We show that domestic transmissibility controls should be prioritized over travel restrictions and international transmissibility controls to limit the virus spread from abroad. Our research sheds light on the proper timing to reopen borders under different domestic disease control scenarios. Since its outbreak in December 2019, the novel coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) has spread to 191 countries and caused millions of deaths. Many countries have experienced multiple epidemic waves and faced containment pressures from both domestic and international transmission. In this study, we conduct a multiscale geographic analysis of the spread of COVID-19 in a policy-influenced dynamic network to quantify COVID-19 importation risk under different policy scenarios using evidence from China. Our spatial dynamic panel data (SDPD) model explicitly distinguishes the effects of travel flows from the effects of transmissibility within cities, across cities, and across national borders. We find that within-city transmission was the dominant transmission mechanism in China at the beginning of the outbreak and that all domestic transmission mechanisms were muted or significantly weakened before importation posed a threat. We identify effective containment policies by matching the change points of domestic and importation transmissibility parameters to the timing of various interventions. Our simulations suggest that importation risk is limited when domestic transmission is under control, but that cumulative cases would have been almost 13 times higher if domestic transmissibility had resurged to its precontainment level after importation and 32 times higher if domestic transmissibility had remained at its precontainment level since the outbreak. Our findings provide practical insights into infectious disease containment and call for collaborative and coordinated global suppression efforts.
