Predicting the international spread of Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS).

Our relatively simple statistical model based on the effective distance derived from the airline transportation network data was found to help predicting the risk of importing MERS at the country level. The successful application of the effective distance model to predict MERS importations, particularly when computationally intensive large-scale transmission models may not be immediately applicable could have been benefited from the particularly low transmissibility of the MERS coronavirus.