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Global tourism, trade, business, education and labor mobility depend on people being able to cross national borders.
The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development estimates that world tourism will lose income in the range of 1.6 to 2.8 percent of global gross domestic product as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) estimates that strict travel restrictions can increase the costs of the service industry by 12%.
A new study, published in the renowned The Lancet Public Health, has mathematically calculated the effect that the so-called import infection has had on the spread of the infection in different countries.
Researchers have evaluated the potential benefits of international travel restrictions when countries experience different epidemic conditions.
They have compared the number of cases of infection as a result of cross-border travel with the cases due to local transmission of the infection in 162 countries.
Interesting findings
Researchers have analyzed infection cases with detailed air traffic data and made calculations in May and September.
There are several interesting findings in the recent study.
On the one hand, the study shows that travel-limiting measures may have little effect on the spread of infection in countries where there are many more cases due to local spread of infection than imported cases.
On the other hand, the study shows that strict travel restrictions may be important in countries that have already managed to reduce the virus outbreak to a low level or in countries where the epidemic is approaching the tipping point of so-called exponential growth.
Norway Category
The researchers note that travel restrictive measures appear to have been justified during the first wave of the corona pandemic.
So, without travel restrictions, transmission of the infection would have contributed more than 10 percent of the total incidence of SARS-CoV-2 infections in the vast majority of countries, their calculations show.
In September, however, it looks different.
Without travel restrictions, import infections would have only exceeded 10% of the total incidence in 56 of 162 countries.
With travel limiting measures, import infections in September will account for more than 10 percent of cases in just 37 of 162 countries, the researchers calculated.
However, Norway falls into the category of countries that appear to benefit from the entry restrictions, both based on the May and September calculations.
– plausible
– In a scenario with no entry restrictions, Norway is ranked as one of the countries with the highest risk of import infection in May 2020. This is plausible because at this time there was significantly less infection in Norway than in most others European countries, deputy health director Espen Rostrup Nakstad tells Dagbladet.
Nakstad thinks the new study is interesting, but notes that it is fraught with some methodological problems “because few countries have a good overview of tracking infections more than two links back, that is, which cases are actually due to infection. import and not “.
It also points out that many of the numbers from infection tracking work across countries are also not available in the published articles on which this study is based.
The study shows that for most countries, where the proportion of imported infections is greater than 1 percent, the percentage can be reduced to less than 1 with restrictions imposed on travelers from countries with high infection pressure.
However, some countries will have to bar the entry of almost all international travelers to reach this threshold, the researchers note.
They cite New Zealand and China as examples of this.
In September, the two countries had an overall incidence low enough that the expected number of imported cases of infection (six and 55, respectively) was close to the total incidence (ten and 45, respectively), meaning that the Imported cases of infection can pose a real risk of triggering a new one. local epidemic wave, researchers say.
Norway’s problem
This is where the Norwegian problem comes in, as shown in the figure at the top of this case.
The country closed in mid-March and it was very effective. Towards the summer, the infection pressure in Norway was very low.
Then authorities opened in mid-July to travel to and from countries with much more infection than Norway.
Figure 3 from the recent Lancet Public Health study shows how much different countries had to limit cross-border traffic for import infections in September to drop below 1% of all new infections.
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Here, Norway is the second worst in Europe, second only to Latvia.
Because we had initially been so good, we really had to have kept tight control at the borders to avoid a further increase in corona infection this fall, largely driven by the import infection.
– Mathematical calculations for the month of September show that Norway then would have had to significantly limit border traffic to reduce import infection cases to less than 1 percent of all new infection cases. The experiences Norwegian municipalities gained during the fall were that many outbreaks were related to business travelers arriving in Norway, says Espen Rostrup Nakstad.
He emphasizes that the estimates in the study for the month of September are extremely uncertain because much of the spread of infection during this period probably took place hidden in Europe and because very few of the infection cases can be traced to a single source. .
Critical
In Dagbladet on November 17, University College of Western Norway security professor Torgrim Log criticized Norwegian authorities for allowing a new infection to enter the country this fall.
Log believed the authorities had found out.
That they would not go at the same rate as in February when health authorities thought it was inappropriate to quarantine travelers from China and Italy upon arrival in Norway.
– Then it happened again, as if we didn’t learn anything about the world. When it opened since the last half of July, authorities once again felt it was inappropriate to quarantine travelers. They opened to import infection, they did it with their eyes open, and now we are in serious trouble again, said the professor.
