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Estimating the prevalence and risk of COVID-19 among international travelers and evacuees of Wuhan through modeling and case reports
Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) started in Wuhan, China and has spread through other provinces and countries through infected travelers. On January 23(rd), 2020, China issued a quarantine and travel ban on Wuhan because travelers from Wuhan were thought to account for the majority of exported CO...
Autores principales: | , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Public Library of Science
2020
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7310725/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32574177 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0234955 |
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author | Luo, George McHenry, Michael L. Letterio, John J. |
author_facet | Luo, George McHenry, Michael L. Letterio, John J. |
author_sort | Luo, George |
collection | PubMed |
description | Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) started in Wuhan, China and has spread through other provinces and countries through infected travelers. On January 23(rd), 2020, China issued a quarantine and travel ban on Wuhan because travelers from Wuhan were thought to account for the majority of exported COVID-19 cases to other countries. Additionally, countries evacuated their citizens from Wuhan after institution of the travel ban. Together, these two populations account for the vast majority of the “total cases with travel history to China” as designated by the World Health Organization (WHO). The current study aims to assess the prevalence and risk of COVID-19 among international travelers and evacuees of Wuhan. We first used case reports from Japan, Singapore, and Korea to investigate the date of flights of infected travelers. We then used airline traveler data and the number of infected exported cases to correlate the cases with the number of travelers for multiple countries. Our findings suggest that the risk of COVID-19 infection is highest among Wuhan travelers between January 19(th) and 22(nd), 2020, with an approximate infection rate of up to 1.3% among international travelers. We also observed that evacuee infection rates varied heavily between countries and propose that the timing of the evacuation and COVID-19 testing of asymptomatic evacuees played significant roles in the infection rates among evacuees. These findings suggest COVID-19 cases and infectivity are much higher than previous estimates, including numbers from the WHO and the literature, and that some estimates of the infectivity of COVID-19 may need re-assessment. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-7310725 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2020 |
publisher | Public Library of Science |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-73107252020-06-26 Estimating the prevalence and risk of COVID-19 among international travelers and evacuees of Wuhan through modeling and case reports Luo, George McHenry, Michael L. Letterio, John J. PLoS One Research Article Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) started in Wuhan, China and has spread through other provinces and countries through infected travelers. On January 23(rd), 2020, China issued a quarantine and travel ban on Wuhan because travelers from Wuhan were thought to account for the majority of exported COVID-19 cases to other countries. Additionally, countries evacuated their citizens from Wuhan after institution of the travel ban. Together, these two populations account for the vast majority of the “total cases with travel history to China” as designated by the World Health Organization (WHO). The current study aims to assess the prevalence and risk of COVID-19 among international travelers and evacuees of Wuhan. We first used case reports from Japan, Singapore, and Korea to investigate the date of flights of infected travelers. We then used airline traveler data and the number of infected exported cases to correlate the cases with the number of travelers for multiple countries. Our findings suggest that the risk of COVID-19 infection is highest among Wuhan travelers between January 19(th) and 22(nd), 2020, with an approximate infection rate of up to 1.3% among international travelers. We also observed that evacuee infection rates varied heavily between countries and propose that the timing of the evacuation and COVID-19 testing of asymptomatic evacuees played significant roles in the infection rates among evacuees. These findings suggest COVID-19 cases and infectivity are much higher than previous estimates, including numbers from the WHO and the literature, and that some estimates of the infectivity of COVID-19 may need re-assessment. Public Library of Science 2020-06-23 /pmc/articles/PMC7310725/ /pubmed/32574177 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0234955 Text en © 2020 Luo et al http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. |
spellingShingle | Research Article Luo, George McHenry, Michael L. Letterio, John J. Estimating the prevalence and risk of COVID-19 among international travelers and evacuees of Wuhan through modeling and case reports |
title | Estimating the prevalence and risk of COVID-19 among international travelers and evacuees of Wuhan through modeling and case reports |
title_full | Estimating the prevalence and risk of COVID-19 among international travelers and evacuees of Wuhan through modeling and case reports |
title_fullStr | Estimating the prevalence and risk of COVID-19 among international travelers and evacuees of Wuhan through modeling and case reports |
title_full_unstemmed | Estimating the prevalence and risk of COVID-19 among international travelers and evacuees of Wuhan through modeling and case reports |
title_short | Estimating the prevalence and risk of COVID-19 among international travelers and evacuees of Wuhan through modeling and case reports |
title_sort | estimating the prevalence and risk of covid-19 among international travelers and evacuees of wuhan through modeling and case reports |
topic | Research Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7310725/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32574177 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0234955 |
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