COVID-19 cases in countries and territories at onset days as function of external tourism inflows

Abstract

In every country except China, COVID-19 first infection cases were imported by travelers, which are either people coming back to their own country or visiting foreigners (international or external tourists). In a global and regional phenomenological analysis of COVID-19 spread, we assume that tourism inflow is a trigger mechanism of worldwide dissemination at the pandemic onset days. Taking into account all countries, a convenient common-time origin timeline was employed as if the beginning of the epidemic would have occurred simultaneously in every country. We obtained very good statistical Pearson and Spearman correlations between accumulated infected cases by country and a positive power of the product [Formula: see text], where [Formula: see text] is the tourism inflow before the pandemic and [Formula: see text] is the country population.