The Predictive Capacity of Air Travel Patterns during the Global Spread of the COVID-19 Pandemic: Risk, Uncertainty and Randomness

Air travel has a decisive role in the spread of infectious diseases at the global level. We present a methodology applied during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic that uses detailed aviation data at the final destination level in order to measure the risk of the disease spreading outside China. The approach proved to be successful in terms of identifying countries with a high risk of infected travellers and as a tool to monitor the evolution of the pandemic in different countries. The high number of undetected or asymptomatic cases of COVID-19, however, limits the capacity of the approach to model the full dynamics. As a result, the risk for countries with a low number of passengers from Hubei province appeared as low. Globalization and international aviation connectivity allow travel times that are much shorter than the incubation period of infectious diseases, a fact that raises the question of how to react in a potential new pandemic.