Temporal variations in international air travel: implications for modelling the spread of infectious diseases

The international flight network creates multiple routes by which pathogens can quickly spread across the globe. In the early stages of infectious disease outbreaks, analyses using flight passenger data to identify countries at risk of importing the pathogen are common and can help inform disease control efforts. A challenge faced in this modelling is that the latest aviation statistics (referred to as contemporary data) are typically not immediately available. Therefore, flight patterns from a previous year are often used (referred to as historical data). We explored the suitability of historical data for predicting the spatial spread of emerging epidemics.

We analysed monthly flight passenger data from the International Air Transport Association to assess how baseline air travel patterns were affected by outbreaks of Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), Zika and severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) over the past decade. We then used a stochastic discrete time susceptible-exposed-infected-recovered (SEIR) metapopulation model to simulate the global spread of different pathogens, comparing how epidemic dynamics differed in simulations based on historical and contemporary data.

We observed local, short-term disruptions to air travel from South Korea and Brazil for the MERS and Zika outbreaks we studied, whereas global and longer-term flight disruptions occurred during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. For outbreak events that were accompanied by local, small and short-term changes in air travel, epidemic models using historical flight data gave similar projections of the timing and locations of disease spread as when using contemporary flight data. However, historical data were less reliable to model the spread of an atypical outbreak such as SARS-CoV-2, in which there were durable and extensive levels of global travel disruption.

The use of historical flight data as a proxy in epidemic models is an acceptable practice, except in rare, large epidemics that lead to substantial disruptions to international travel.