Mapping ex ante risks of COVID‐19 in Indonesia using a Bayesian geostatistical model on airport network data

A rapid response to global infectious disease outbreaks is crucial to protect public health. Ex ante information on the spatial probability distribution of early infections can guide governments to better target protection efforts. We propose a two‐stage statistical approach to spatially map the ex ante importation risk of COVID‐19 and its uncertainty across Indonesia based on a minimal set of routinely available input data related to the Indonesian flight network, traffic and population data, and geographical information. In a first step, we use a generalised additive model to predict the ex ante COVID‐19 risk for 78 domestic Indonesian airports based on data from a global model on the disease spread and covariates associated with Indonesian airport network flight data prior to the global COVID‐19 outbreak. In a second step, we apply a Bayesian geostatistical model to propagate the estimated COVID‐19 risk from the airports to all of Indonesia using freely available spatial covariates including traffic density, population and two spatial distance metrics. The results of our analysis are illustrated using exceedance probability surface maps, which provide policy‐relevant information accounting for the uncertainty of the estimates on the location of areas at risk and those that might require further data collection.