Abstract:Communicable diseases including COVID-19 pose a major threat to public health worldwide. To curb the spread of communicable diseases effectively, timely surveillance and prediction of the risk of pandemics are essential. The aim of this study is to analyze free and publicly available data to construct useful travel data records for network statistics other than common descriptive statistics. This study describes analytical findings of time-series plots and spatial-temporal maps to illustrate or visualize pande… Show more
“…Although morbidity and mortality caused by such service suspension are not included in the official COVID-19 statistics, the effects cannot be overlooked. Furthermore, uncontrolled local epidemic can cause outbreaks in other regions with close ties [ 31 ]. The damage brought by a severe local outbreak of COVID-19 is unbearable.…”
Background
Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) led to pandemic that affected almost all countries in the world. Many countries have implemented border restriction as a public health measure to limit local outbreak. However, there is inadequate scientific data to support such a practice, especially in the presence of an established local transmission of the disease.
Objective
To apply a metapopulation Susceptible-Exposed-Infectious-Recovered (SEIR) model with inspected migration to investigate the effect of border restriction as a public health measure to limit outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019.
Methods
We apply a modified metapopulation SEIR model with inspected migration with simulating population migration, and incorporating parameters such as efficiency of custom inspection in blocking infected travelers in the model. The population sizes were retrieved from government reports, while the number of COVID-19 patients were retrieved from Hong Kong Department of Health and China Centre for Disease Control (CDC) data. The R0 was obtained from previous clinical studies.
Results
Complete border closure can help to reduce the cumulative COVID-19 case number and mortality in Hong Kong by 13.99% and 13.98% respectively. To prevent full occupancy of isolation facilities in Hong Kong; effective public health measures to reduce local R0 to below 1.6 was necessary, apart from having complete border closure.
Conclusions
Early complete travel restriction is effective in reducing cumulative cases and mortality. However, additional anti-COVID-19 measures to reduce local R0 to below 1.6 are necessary to prevent COVID-19 cases from overwhelming hospital isolation facilities.
“…Although morbidity and mortality caused by such service suspension are not included in the official COVID-19 statistics, the effects cannot be overlooked. Furthermore, uncontrolled local epidemic can cause outbreaks in other regions with close ties [ 31 ]. The damage brought by a severe local outbreak of COVID-19 is unbearable.…”
Background
Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) led to pandemic that affected almost all countries in the world. Many countries have implemented border restriction as a public health measure to limit local outbreak. However, there is inadequate scientific data to support such a practice, especially in the presence of an established local transmission of the disease.
Objective
To apply a metapopulation Susceptible-Exposed-Infectious-Recovered (SEIR) model with inspected migration to investigate the effect of border restriction as a public health measure to limit outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019.
Methods
We apply a modified metapopulation SEIR model with inspected migration with simulating population migration, and incorporating parameters such as efficiency of custom inspection in blocking infected travelers in the model. The population sizes were retrieved from government reports, while the number of COVID-19 patients were retrieved from Hong Kong Department of Health and China Centre for Disease Control (CDC) data. The R0 was obtained from previous clinical studies.
Results
Complete border closure can help to reduce the cumulative COVID-19 case number and mortality in Hong Kong by 13.99% and 13.98% respectively. To prevent full occupancy of isolation facilities in Hong Kong; effective public health measures to reduce local R0 to below 1.6 was necessary, apart from having complete border closure.
Conclusions
Early complete travel restriction is effective in reducing cumulative cases and mortality. However, additional anti-COVID-19 measures to reduce local R0 to below 1.6 are necessary to prevent COVID-19 cases from overwhelming hospital isolation facilities.
“…Some studies proposed temporal and spatial analysis of COVID-19 spreading focusing on air flows and dispersion of aerosolized virus in polluted areas ( Zheng et al, 2021 ), meteorological variables ( Wang et al, 2021 ), traffic volumes ( Mu et al, 2020 ). Network analyses have been carried out on cross-country pandemic air connectedness ( Chu et al, 2021 ), maritime transport ( Wang et al, 2022 ), high-speed railway ( Zhang et al, 2020a , Zhang et al, 2020b ): the attention was paid on mass public transport. Conversely, in this study the authors investigated how the highway transportation network in the Northern Italy exacerbated the large-scale spreading of COVID-19 during the first wave.…”
“…A main difference with international air transportation, for instance, is that much more precise data regarding daily flights and passenger flows are available. Passenger arrival and departure contamination tests are also nowadays widely processed; this makes COVID-19 risk evaluations much easier to evaluate [18,19].…”
Maritime ports are critical logistics hubs that play an important role when preventing the transmission of COVID-19-imported infections from incoming international-going ships. This study introduces a data-driven method to dynamically model infection risks of international ports from imported COVID-19 cases. The approach is based on global Automatic Identification System (AIS) data and a spatio-temporal clustering algorithm that both automatically identifies ports and countries approached by ships and correlates them with country COVID-19 statistics and stopover dates. The infection risk of an individual ship is firstly modeled by considering the current number of COVID-19 cases of the approached countries, increase rate of the new cases, and ship capacity. The infection risk of a maritime port is mainly calculated as the aggregation of the risks of all of the ships stopovering at a specific date. This method is applied to track the risk of the imported COVID-19 of the main cruise ports worldwide. The results show that the proposed method dynamically estimates the risk level of the overseas imported COVID-19 of cruise ports and has the potential to provide valuable support to improve prevention measures and reduce the risk of imported COVID-19 cases in seaports.
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