Volume 28, Issue 2, March 2021

Travel medicine has virtually stopped in light of the coronavirus pandemic. It is worth contemplating how travel medicine will be affected by the ongoing pandemic when international travel starts to become more possible. How will we advise patients and use the coming vaccines that may be available? Travel medicine practices are well-suited to play a major role in advising travellers in the pandemic era.

To support the resumption of travel, rational and consistent testing and quarantine guidelines will be critical. Uniformity in the documentation of COVID-19 test results and vaccination will also be important. We discuss evidence to support standardized testing and quarantine requirements and propose a strategy to allow ease in travel planning.

A coronavirus disease (COVID-19) genome surveillance has been conducted at four international airports in Japan, revealing a potential imported COVID-19 risk from multiple countries. The quarantine surveillance based on genome sequencing can enhance sequencing efforts worldwide, as returning travelers may serve as excellent sentinels for the global pandemic.

The emerging N501Y mutation in severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2, which becomes prevalent in the UK rapidly, is one of the major challenges of COVID-19 control. To explore the transmission advantage, we estimate that the N501Y substitution increases the infectivity by 52% (95% confidence interval: 46, 58) in terms of the reproduction number.

We have isolated the new severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 variant of concern 202 012/01 from the positive coronavirus disease 2019 cases that travelled from the UK to India in the month of December 2020. This emphasizes the need for the strengthened surveillance system to limit the local transmission of this new variant.

Data analysis on the spread of COVID-19 in Bushehr, one of the warmest provinces of Iran, indicates that rising summer temperatures do not reduce the reproduction number and the spread of COVID-19.

In this letter, we find a Simpson’s paradox in the association between gross domestic product and coronavirus disease 2019 transmission in Chinese cities stratified by location. The differential associations in cities within and outside Hubei province can be explained by the different patterns of short-range and long-range multiscale mobility from Wuhan to other cities.

In our re-analysis with adjusted assumptions, we found that a previous study substantially oversestimated the effectiveness of Australia’s complete travel ban against China in the introduction of SARS-CoV-2 into Australia.

Teaser The management of the coronavirus disease pandemic in reception centres for migrants is burdened by significant critical issues mainly due to linguistic, cultural and social differences related to the heterogeneity of the migrants hosted. Here we reported the field analysis of these critical issues and adopted solutions.

The second wave of COVID-19 has been reported in many countries such as Vietnam after 99 days without any further local transmission since the first wave. Here we report on the success story in Taiwan in fighting the COVID-19, currently keeping 222 days without an indigenous case of COVID.

A dignitary from a European country made an official visit to Thailand in November 2020. Due to the nature of this visit, a standard 14-day quarantine was not implemented. After a series of meetings with diplomats and hotel staffers, the dignitary was diagnosed with COVID-19. Here, we detailed the transmission and the genomic investigation from the visit, presenting the factors that need to be considered when a standard quarantine was waivered.

Metropolitan wholesale markets are at high risk of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) spread as originally seen in Wuhan, China. We studied the metropolitan wholesale market-related resurgence of COVID-19 in Beijing, China, and highlight the importance of control strategies based on the temporospatial characteristics of wholesale markets.