ABSTRACT
The component of human life that has been most significantly altered by the COVID-19 epidemic is travel. Due to the upheaval produced by the pandemic breakout, countries are becoming increasingly avaricious and are scrambling to stockpile vaccines. The world has been locked down to reduce/control the pandemic outbreak, driving countries to shut their doors to other people from countries. The recent pandemic has had a short-term, positive effect on the environment, but travel restrictions have caused problems for the common person and are expected to deteriorate more soon, necessitating longer quarantines, vaccination requirements, vaccine passports, and immunization certificates required by countries for safe travel. Thus, this study has three objectives. First, we investigate the impact of COVID-19 on travel and the environment, as well as the role that tourists play in the transmission of the virus. Second, we examine how countries are handling COVID-19 vaccines. Finally, we pinpoint differences in vaccination coverage.
ABSTRACT
Background: Corona Virus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) due to severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) emerged in Wuhan city and rapidly spread throughout China since late December 2019. Crude case fatality ratio (CFR) with dividing the number of known deaths by the number of confirmed cases does not represent the true CFR and might be off by orders of magnitude. We aim to provide a precise estimate of the CFR of COVID-19 using statistical models at the early stage of the epidemic. Methods: We extracted data from the daily released epidemic report published by the National Health Commission P. R. China from 20 Jan 2020, to 1 March 2020. Competing risk model was used to obtain the cumulative hazards for death, cure, and cure-death hazard ratio. Then the CFR was estimated based on the slope of the last piece in joinpoint regression model, which reflected the most recent trend of the epidemic. Results: As of 1 March 2020, totally 80,369 cases were diagnosed as COVID-19 in China. The CFR of COVID-19 were estimated to be 70.9% (95% CI: 66.8%-75.6%) during Jan 20-Feb 2, 20.2% (18.6%-22.1%) during Feb 3-14, 6.9% (6.4%-7.4%) during Feb 15-23, 1.5% (1.4%-1.6%) during Feb 24-March 1 in Hubei province, and 20.3% (17.0%-25.3%) during Jan 20-28, 1.9% (1.8%-2.1%) during Jan 29-Feb 12, 0.9% (0.8%-1.1%) during Feb 13-18, 0.4% (0.4%-0.5%) during Feb 19-March 1 in other areas of China, respectively. Conclusions: Based on analyses of public data, we found that the CFR in Hubei was much higher than that of other regions in China, over 3 times in all estimation. The CFR would follow a downwards trend based on our estimation from recently released data. Nevertheless, at early stage of outbreak, CFR estimates should be viewed cautiously because of limited data source on true onset and recovery time.