A Measure to Estimate the Risk of Imported COVID-19 Cases and Its Application for Evaluating Travel-related Control Measures

Overview

Journal Sci Rep

Specialty Science

Date 2022 Jun 10

PMID 35681085

Authors

Heewon Kang

Kyung-Duk Min

Seonghee Jeon

Ju-Yeun Lee

Sung-Il Cho

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

High connectivity between nations facilitates the spread of infectious diseases. We introduce an improved measure to estimate the risk of COVID-19 importation. The measure was applied to identify the effectiveness of travel-related control measures. We estimated the risk of importation, using the product of air-travel volume and COVID-19 prevalence in the area-of-origin. Travel volumes were acquired through real-time mobile data, and prevalence was calculated considering the time-varying strength of the COVID-19 testing policy. With the measure, the number of expected-imported cases was calculated, and compared with the reported-imported COVID-19 cases before and after post-entry quarantine for all entrants. The expected and reported-imported cases were well fitted (R = 0.8). A maximum of 35 undetected-imported cases was estimated to have entered Seoul, before the first imported COVID-19 case was confirmed. With the travel-related control measures, at most, 48 (73%) imported cases could be isolated from the local community. Our measure predicted trends in imported COVID-19 cases well. The method used to develop the measure can be applied to future emerging infectious diseases. Our results provide a 'real-world' evidence that travel-related control measures are effective at curbing further COVID-19 transmission.

Citing Articles

The impact of multiple non-pharmaceutical interventions for China-bound travel on domestic COVID-19 outbreaks.

Yang L, Hu M, Zeng H, Liang W, Zhu J Front Public Health. 2023; 11:1202996.

PMID: 37521963 PMC: 10373927. DOI: 10.3389/fpubh.2023.1202996.

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