Human Mobility and the Global Spread of Infectious Diseases: A Focus on Air Travel

Findlater, Aidan; Bogoch, Isaac I.

doi:10.1016/j.pt.2018.07.004

Cited by 239 publications

(202 citation statements)

References 104 publications

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“…Several risk factors have been implicated with the fast spread of the virus, including super spread events 33,34 . Its further spread to different countries has been attributed to air travellers [35][36][37]6,[38][39][40][41][42] . A number of personal risk factors have further been implicated with higher morbidity and mortality rates of Covid-19, including male gender and smoking status.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

COVID-19 higher induced mortality in Chinese regions with lower air quality

Pansini

Fornacca

2020

Preprint

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COVID-19 has spread in all continents in a span of just over three months, escalating into a pandemic that poses several humanitarian as well as scientific challenges. We here investigated the geographical expansion of the infection and correlate it with the annual indexes of air quality observed from the Sentinel-5 satellite orbiting around China, Italy and the U.S.A. Controlling for population size, we find more viral infections in those areas afflicted by Carbon Monoxide (CO) and Nitrogen Dioxide (NO2). Higher mortality was also correlated with poor air quality, namely with high PM2.5, CO and NO2 values. In Italy, the correspondence between poor air quality and SARS-CoV-2 appearance and induced mortality was the starkest. Similar to smoking, people living in polluted areas are more vulnerable to SARS-CoV-2 infections and induced mortality. This further suggests the detrimental impact climate change will have on the trajectory of future epidemics.Significance -We found a significant correlation between levels of air quality and COVID-19 spread and mortality in China, Italy and the United States. Despite the infection being still ongoing at a global level, these correlations are relatively robust not being influenced by varying population densities. Living in an area with low air quality seems to be a risk factor for becoming infected and dying from this new form of coronavirus.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

COVID-19 higher induced mortality in Chinese regions with lower air quality

Pansini

Fornacca

2020

Preprint

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“…On 8 January 2019, news outlets and ProMED-mail reported that genetic sequencing demonstrated a novel coronavirus as the potential causative organism. 2 Given the recent history of zoonotic transmission of a coronavirus emerging from a live-animal market in China in 2002, and the potential for novel pathogens to rapidly spread globally via commercial air travel, 3,4 we sought to evaluate international travel patterns from Wuhan, China in order to anticipate patterns of disease dispersion should this outbreak evolve.…”

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confidence: 99%

Pneumonia of unknown aetiology in Wuhan, China: potential for international spread via commercial air travel

Bogoch

Watts

Thomas-Bachli

et al. 2020

Journal of Travel Medicine

806

573

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“…A systematic review of the effectiveness of travel reductions concluded that internal travel restrictions as well as international border restrictions both delay the spread of influenza epidemics (Mateus et al, 2014). Therefore, given the staggering global increase in global mobility during the Anthropocene documented in Table 1, the increase of the number of disease outbreaks, of diseases involved in these outbreaks, and of countries affected, as well as the decrease of modularity of these disease outbreaks make sense because the mobility of humans, other living beings, and goods (which can act as carriers or vectors) all facilitate the spread of disease and species (e.g., Smith and Guégan, 2010;Findlater and Bogoch, 2018;Sardain et al, 2019).…”

Section: General Discussion and Future Implicationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The accelerated infectious disease risk in the Anthropocene: more outbreaks and wider global spread

Morand

Walther

2020

Preprint

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The greatly accelerated economic growth during the Anthropocene has resulted in astonishing improvements in many aspects of human well-being, but has also caused the acceleration of risks, such as the interlinked biodiversity and climate crisis. Here, we report on another risk: the accelerated infectious disease risk associated with the number and geographic spread of human infectious disease outbreaks. Using the most complete, reliable, and up-to-date database on human infectious disease outbreaks (GIDEON), we show that the number of disease outbreaks, the number of diseases involved in these outbreaks, and the number of countries affected have increased during the entire Anthropocene. Furthermore, the spatial distribution of these outbreaks is becoming more globalized in the sense that the overall modularity of the disease networks across the globe has decreased, meaning disease outbreaks have become increasingly pandemic in their nature. This decrease in modularity is correlated with the increase in air traffic. We finally show that those countries and regions which are most central within these disease networks tend to be countries with higher GDPs. Therefore, one cost of increased global mobility and greater economic growth is the increased risk of disease outbreaks and their faster and wider spread. We briefly discuss three different scenarios which decision-makers might follow in light of our results.

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Human Mobility and the Global Spread of Infectious Diseases: A Focus on Air Travel

Cited by 239 publications

References 104 publications

COVID-19 higher induced mortality in Chinese regions with lower air quality

COVID-19 higher induced mortality in Chinese regions with lower air quality

Pneumonia of unknown aetiology in Wuhan, China: potential for international spread via commercial air travel

The accelerated infectious disease risk in the Anthropocene: more outbreaks and wider global spread

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