Significance of major transportation hubs in the prediction of COVID-19 in Canada

Transportation hub cities play a significant role in the spread of infectious diseases due to their role as centers of connectivity for local, national, and international transportation networks. In this paper, we studied the transportation hub cities’ effect on the COVID-19 spread in smaller cities such as Regina and Saskatoon. The time-lagged correlation analysis showed that Canada’s international transportation hub cities lead the spread of COVID-19 in smaller non-hub cities and the amount of correlation is considerable. In addition, we have used a univariate and a multi-variate LSTM model to demonstrate that considering the disease status in the major transportation hub cities will decrease the forecasting error in two smaller non-hub cities. Overall, the results show that considering the data from the major transportation hub cities is a beneficial indicator for analyzing and predicting the disease spread in smaller non-hub cities.