ArticleSpatial statistics2022
Modelling the effect of a border closure between Switzerland and Italy on the spatiotemporal spread of COVID-19 in Switzerland.
Article in Spatial statistics, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 16 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
16 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Spatio-Temporal COVID-19 Modeling: A Global Systematic Review of Data Integration, Equity, and Lessons for Pandemic Preparedness.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2026Pooled it
- Capturing the spatiotemporal spread of COVID-19 in 30 European countries during 2020 - 2022.BMC public health · 2025Article
- Health Outcomes in EU Cross-Border Regions: A Scoping Review.Public health reviews · 2025Review
- Endemic-epidemic modelling of school closure to prevent spread of COVID-19 in Switzerland.BMC infectious diseases · 2024Article
- Exploring the Spatial and Temporal Patterns of Children and Adolescents with COVID-19 Infections in Slovakia during March 2020 to July 2022.Medicina (Kaunas, Lithuania) · 2024Article
- Review
- Predicting subnational incidence of COVID-19 cases and deaths in EU countries.BMC infectious diseases · 2024Article
- Using surveillance data for early warning modelling of highly pathogenic avian influenza in Europe reveals a seasonal shift in transmission, 2016-2022.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- The impact of national and international travel on spatio-temporal transmission of SARS-CoV-2 in Belgium in 2021.BMC infectious diseases · 2023Article
- Spatio-temporal model to investigate COVID-19 spread accounting for the mobility amongst municipalities.Spatial and spatio-temporal epidemiology · 2023Article
- Fine-scale variation in the effect of national border on COVID-19 spread: A case study of the Saxon-Czech border region.Spatial and spatio-temporal epidemiology · 2023Article
- Session 3 of the RSS Special Topic Meeting on Covid-19 Transmission: Replies to the discussion.Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Series A, (Statistics in Society) · 2022Article
- Assessing the effect of school closures on the spread of COVID-19 in Zurich.Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Series A, (Statistics in Society) · 2022Article
- Extended Bayesian endemic-epidemic models to incorporate mobility data into COVID-19 forecasting.The Canadian journal of statistics = Revue canadienne de statistique · 2022Article
- Evaluating the effectiveness of Hong Kong's border restriction policy in reducing COVID-19 infections.BMC public health · 2022Article
- Does high COVID-19 spread impact neighbouring countries? Quasi-experimental evidence from the first year of the pandemic in Ireland.HRB open research · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
We present an approach to extend the endemic-epidemic (EE) modelling framework for the analysis of infectious disease data. In its spatiotemporal formulation, spatial dependencies have originally been captured by static neighbourhood matrices. These weight matrices are adjusted over time to reflect changes in spatial connectivity between geographical units. We illustrate this extension by modelling the spread of COVID-19 disease between Swiss and bordering Italian regions in the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. The spatial weights are adjusted with data describing the daily changes in population mobility patterns, and indicators of border closures describing the state of travel restrictions since the beginning of the pandemic. These time-dependent weights are used to fit an EE model to the region-stratified time series of new COVID-19 cases. We then adjust the weight matrices to reflect two counterfactual scenarios of border closures and draw counterfactual predictions based on these, to retrospectively assess the usefulness of border closures. Predictions based on a scenario where no closure of the Swiss-Italian border occurred increased the number of cumulative cases in Switzerland by a factor of 2.7 (10th to 90th percentile: 2.2 to 3.6) over the study period. Conversely, a closure of the Swiss-Italian border two weeks earlier than implemented would have resulted in only a 12% (8% to 18%) decrease in the number of cases and merely delayed the epidemic spread by a couple of weeks. Our study provides useful insight into modelling the effect of epidemic countermeasures on the spatiotemporal spread of COVID-19.
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