How do the smart travel ban policy and intercity travel pattern affect COVID-19 trends? Lessons learned from Iran

COVID-19, as the most significant epidemic of the century, infected 467 million people and took the lives of more than 6 million individuals as of March 19, 2022. Due to the rapid transmission of the disease and the lack of definitive treatment, countries have employed nonpharmaceutical interventions. This study aimed to investigate the effectiveness of the smart travel ban policy, which has been implemented for non-commercial vehicles in the intercity highways of Iran since November 21, 2020. The other goal was to suggest efficient COVID-19 forecasting tools and to examine the association of intercity travel patterns and COVID-19 trends in Iran. To this end, weekly confirmed cases and deaths due to COVID-19 and the intercity traffic flow reported by loop detectors were aggregated at the country’s level. The Box-Jenkins methodology was employed to evaluate the policy’s effectiveness, using the interrupted time series analysis. The results indicated that the autoregressive integrated moving average with explanatory variable (ARIMAX) model outperformed the univariate ARIMA model in predicting the disease trends based on the MAPE criterion. The weekly intercity traffic and its lagged variables were entered as covariates in both models of the disease cases and deaths. The results indicated that the weekly intercity traffic increases the new weekly COVID-19 cases and deaths with a time lag of two and five weeks, respectively. Besides, the interrupted time series analysis indicated that the smart travel ban policy had decreased intercity travel by around 29%. Nonetheless, it had no significant direct effect on COVID-19 trends. This study suggests that the travel ban policy would not be efficient lonely unless it is coupled with active measures and adherence to health protocols by the people.