Is it safe to lift COVID-19 travel bans? The Newfoundland story

Perceptions of the ethical permissibility of strict travel restrictions to mitigate transmission of SARS-CoV-2

Although there has been extensive exploration of public opinion surrounding many non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) aimed at mitigating transmission of SARS-CoV-2 (e.g. mask-wearing and social distancing), there has been less discussion of the public's perception of the ethical appropriateness other NPIs. This paper presents the results of a survey of U.S. adults' opinions of the ethical permissibility of both state-to-state and international travel restrictions to mitigate transmission of SARS-CoV-2. Our research revealed overall high agreement with the ethical permissibility of both state-to-state and international travel restrictions, though we saw significant difference across political party affiliation and conservative/liberal ideologies. Other factors associated with agreement with state-to-state travel restrictions included increasing education, increasing income, and both high and low commitment altruism. When considering international travel restrictions, income, education, and low commitment altruism were associated with increased agreement with the ethical permissibility of international travel restrictions. Ethical analysis and implications are explored.

Framework for assessing and easing global COVID-19 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.