With the domestic and international spread of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), much attention has been given to estimating pandemic risk. We propose the novel application of a well-established scientific approachthe network analysisto provide a direct visualization of the COVID-19 pandemic risk; infographics are provided in the figures. By showing visually the degree of connectedness between different regions based on reported confirmed cases of COVID-19, we demonstrate that network analysis provides a relatively simple yet powerful way to estimate the pandemic risk.
The spread of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has caused more than 80 million confirmed infected cases and more than 1.8 million people died as of 31 December 2020. While it is essential to quantify risk and characterize transmission dynamics in closed populations using Susceptible-Infection-Recovered modeling, the investigation of the effect from worldwide pandemic cannot be neglected. This study proposes a network analysis to assess global pandemic risk by linking 164 countries in pandemic networks, where links between countries were specified by the level of ‘co-movement’ of newly confirmed COVID-19 cases. More countries showing increase in the COVID-19 cases simultaneously will signal the pandemic prevalent over the world. The network density, clustering coefficients, and assortativity in the pandemic networks provide early warning signals of the pandemic in late February 2020. We propose a preparedness pandemic risk score for prediction and a severity risk score for pandemic control. The preparedness risk score contributed by countries in Asia is between 25% and 50% most of the time after February and America contributes around 40% in July 2020. The high preparedness risk contribution implies the importance of travel restrictions between those countries. The severity risk score of America and Europe contribute around 90% in December 2020, signifying that the control of COVID-19 is still worrying in America and Europe. We can keep track of the pandemic situation in each country using an online dashboard to update the pandemic risk scores and contributions.
We analyze the COVID-19 pandemic development in Latin America by network analysis to demonstrate the effectiveness of air travel restriction in reducing pandemic risk and provide risk analysis for air travel reopening in Latin America. We reinforce the importance of restricting air travel before and during local transmission of COVID-19.
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