AUTHOR=Xu Mingda , Du Zhanwei , Shan Songwei , Xu Xiaoke , Bai Yuan , Wu Peng , Lau Eric H. Y. , Cowling Benjamin J. TITLE=RiskEstim: A Software Package to Quantify COVID-19 Importation Risk JOURNAL=Frontiers in Physics VOLUME=10 YEAR=2022 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/physics/articles/10.3389/fphy.2022.835992 DOI=10.3389/fphy.2022.835992 ISSN=2296-424X ABSTRACT=

We present an R package developed to quantify coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) importation risk. Quantifying and visualizing the importation risk of COVID-19 from inbound travelers is urgent and imperative to trigger public health responses, especially in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic and emergence of new SARS-CoV-2 variants. We provide a general modeling framework to estimate COVID-19 importation risk using estimated pre-symptomatic prevalence of infection and air traffic data from the multi-origin places. We use Hong Kong as a case study to illustrate how our modeling framework can estimate the COVID-19 importation risk into Hong Kong from cities in Mainland China in real time. This R package can be used as a complementary component of the pandemic surveillance system to monitor spread in the next pandemic.