How COVID-19 Changed the Culture of Work

The COVID-19 pandemic created a historic disruption to contemporary society including how, where, and when we work. Given the ubiquity of human capital, most if not every society was crippled by the displacement of the workforce with historic impacts on productivity; GDP in the UK will be at its lowest in 300 years, requiring the largest peacetime debt accumulation in history. Stimulus packages occurred in many countries as a result of the inability to access the workplace, particularly school, restaurant, or travel. Airline travel in the US fell by a precipitous 93% at its nadir, the cruise industry collapsed, and trans-national crossing all but ceased to exist. Along with the freeze in people movement, supply chains were disrupted including components necessary for both treatment and vaccination. The shrinkage of the world we had grown up with became the catalyst for the first pandemic in a century.

A Case of ‘All-or-None’? The Impact of Airline Travel On The Precocity And Severity of Covid-19 In Sub-National Areas Across 46 Countries

Human travel fed the worldwide spread of Covid-19, but it remains unclear whether the volume of incoming air passengers and the centrality of airports in the global airline network made some regions more vulnerable to earlier and higher mortality. We assess whether the precocity and severity of Covid-19 deaths were contingent on these measures of air travel intensity, controlling for differences in local non-pharmaceutical interventions and pre-pandemic structural characteristics of 503 sub-national areas on five continents in April-July 2020. OLS models of precocity (i.e., the timing of the 1st and 10th death outbreaks) reveal that the volume of incoming passengers and the centrality of airports were not impactful once we controlled for local characteristics. We model severity (i.e., the weekly death incidence of Covid-19) with both GLMM and OLS regressions. Results suggest that death incidence was insensitive to the number of passengers and airport centrality, with no substantial changes over time. However, total travel bans did reduce mortality significantly. We conclude that Covid-19 importation through air travel followed an ‘All-or-None’ principle: it contributed to mortality at all times but not proportionally to the number of incoming passengers nor the position of airports in the global network of travel.

Policies for Easing COVID-19 Pandemic Travel Restrictions

During the COVID-19 pandemic, many countries implemented international travel restrictions that aimed to contain viral spread while still allowing necessary cross-border travel for social and economic reasons. The relative effectiveness of these approaches for controlling the pandemic has gone largely unstudied. Here we developed a flexible network meta-population model to compare the effectiveness of international travel policies, with a focus on evaluating the benefit of policy coordination. Because country-level epidemiological parameters are unknown, they need to be estimated from data; we accomplished this using approximate Bayesian computation, given the nature of our complex stochastic disease transmission model. Based on simulation and theoretical insights we find that, under our proposed policy, international airline travel may resume up to 58% of the pre-pandemic level with pandemic control comparable to that of a complete shutdown of all airline travel. Our results demonstrate that global coordination is necessary to allow for maximum travel with minimum effect on viral spread.

Routine asymptomatic testing strategies for airline travel during the COVID-19 pandemic: a simulation analysis

BackgroundAirline travel has been significantly reduced during the COVID-19 pandemic due to concern for individual risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection and population-level transmission risk from importation. Routine viral testing strategies for COVID-19 may facilitate safe airline travel through reduction of individual and/or population-level risk, although the effectiveness and optimal design of these “test-and-travel” strategies remain unclear.MethodsWe developed a microsimulation of SARS-CoV-2 transmission in a cohort of airline travelers to evaluate the effectiveness of various testing strategies to reduce individual risk of infection and population-level risk of transmission. We evaluated five testing strategies in asymptomatic passengers: i) anterior nasal polymerase chain reaction (PCR) within 3 days of departure; ii) PCR within 3 days of departure and PCR 5 days after arrival; iii) rapid antigen test on the day of travel (assuming 90% of the sensitivity of PCR during active infection); iv) rapid antigen test on the day of travel and PCR 5 days after arrival; and v) PCR within 3 days of arrival alone. The travel period was defined as three days prior to the day of travel and two weeks following the day of travel, and we assumed passengers followed guidance on mask wearing during this period. The primary study outcome was cumulative number of infectious days in the cohort over the travel period (population-level transmission risk); the secondary outcome was the proportion of infectious persons detected on the day of travel (individual-level risk of infection). Sensitivity analyses were conducted.FindingsAssuming a community SARS-CoV-2 incidence of 50 daily infections, we estimated that in a cohort of 100,000 airline travelers followed over the travel period, there would be a total of 2,796 (95% UI: 2,031, 4,336) infectious days with 229 (95% UI: 170, 336) actively infectious passengers on the day of travel. The pre-travel PCR test (within 3 days prior to departure) reduced the number of infectious days by 35% (95% UI: 27, 42) and identified 88% (95% UI: 76, 94) of the actively infectious travelers on the day of flight; the addition of PCR 5 days after arrival reduced the number of infectious days by 79% (95% UI: 71, 84). The rapid antigen test on the day of travel reduced the number of infectious days by 32% (95% UI: 25, 39) and identified 87% (95% UI: 81, 92) of the actively infectious travelers; the addition of PCR 5 days after arrival reduced the number of infectious days by 70% (95% UI: 65, 75). The post-travel PCR test alone (within 3 days of landing) reduced the number of infectious days by 42% (95% UI: 31, 51). The ratio of true positives to false positives varied with the incidence of infection. The overall study conclusions were robust in sensitivity analysis.InterpretationRoutine asymptomatic testing for COVID-19 prior to travel can be an effective strategy to reduce individual risk of COVID-19 infection during travel, although post-travel testing with abbreviated quarantine is likely needed to reduce population-level transmission due to importation of infection when traveling from a high to low incidence setting.

Introduction All at Sea

For centuries now, the sea has been at the very heart of tourism. For hundreds of millions of people worldwide, going on vacation still means going to the coast, particularly for their annual summer break. This magnetic pull of the sea motivates millions of people every week, from Stockholm to Sydney, New York to New Delhi, to head to their favourite beaches and seaside resorts. The lure of the sea makes them willing to put up with the hassles of modern airline travel and being stuck for hours in huge traffic jams so they can spend a few days each year by the ocean. What they do when they arrive at the coast, however, varies dramatically from tourist to tourist. For some they are content just to drink in the views, take photos and sit in their car viewing the sea through their windscreens. For others it means lying on the beach soaking up the sun, people-watching or playing ball games. Some tourists come to enjoy the man-made attractions that develop wherever tourists make their annual seasonal migration to the ocean. This can mean everything from casinos to theme parks, gift shops to theatres. In these cases, the sea is simply a backdrop to the vacation, with little real interaction with it on the part of the visitor.