The influence of passenger air traffic on the spread of COVID-19 in the world

Countries in the world are suffering from COVID-19 and would like to control it. Thus, some authorities voted for new policies and even stopped passenger air traffic. Those decisions were not uniform, and this study focuses on how passenger air traffic might influence the spread of COVID-19 in the world. We used data sets of cases from the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University and air transport (passengers carried) from the World Bank. Besides, we computed Poisson, QuasiPoisson, Negative binomial, zero-inflated Poisson, and zero-inflated negative binomial models with cross-validation to make sure that our findings are robust. Actually, when passenger air traffic increases by one unit, the number of cases increases by one new infection.