Assessing global pandemic risks from emerging infectious diseases and high containment laboratory leaks: A...

Future pandemics could arise from several sources, notably, emerging infectious diseases (EID); and lab leaks from high containment biological laboratories (HCBL). Recent advances in infectious disease, information technology, and biotechnology provide building blocks to reduce pandemic risk if deployed intelligently. However, the global nature of infectious diseases, distribution of HCBLs, and increasing complexity of transmission dynamics due to travel networks make it difficult to determine how to best deploy mitigation efforts. Increasing understanding of the risk landscape posed by EID and HCBL lab leaks could improve risk reduction efforts. The presented paper develops a country-level spatial network susceptible-infected-removed model based on global travel network data and relative risk measures of potential origin sources, EID, and lab leaks from biological safety level 3+ and 4 labs, to explore expected infections over the first 30 days of a pandemic. Model outputs indicate that EID and lab leaks in India, the USA, and China are most impacted at day 30. For EID, expected infections shift from high EID origin potential countries at day 10 to the USA, India, and China, while for lab leaks, the USA and India start with high lab leak potential. With respect to model uncertainties and limitations, results indicate several large, wealthy countries are influential to pandemic risk from both EID and lab leaks, indicating high leverage points for mitigation efforts.