INTERNATIONAL travel had the biggest impact on coronavirus death rates during the first wave of the pandemic, a study suggests.
Researchers from the University of Aberdeen examined a range of Covid-19 risk factors including border arrivals, population density, percentage of people living in urban areas, average body mass index and smoking prevalence.
They found an increase of a million international arrivals was associated with a 3.4% rise in the mean daily increase in Covid-19 deaths during the first wave of the pandemic across the 37 worst-hit countries.
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Tiberiu Pana, medical student and author of the study, said: “We found that international travel was the strongest predictor of mortality increase.
“Another factor which appeared to play an important role was country-level BCG vaccination coverage, increases in which may be associated with decreases in death rates.
“Nevertheless, these associations were weaker and further work looking at individual patients is required to clarify these potential relationships.
“Our assessment of available data indicates that very early restrictions on international travel might have made a difference in the spread of the pandemic in western Europe, including the UK.
“These findings are particularly important as the world looks to control future waves and strains of the Covid-19 pandemic and prevent related deaths.”
The study examined country-specific daily reports of coronavirus deaths between December 31, 2019 and June 8, 2020.
It used international travel data for 2018 as a proxy for 2020 data before international travel restrictions were imposed.
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The study comes as the Scottish Government looks to impose much tougher restrictions on people coming into Scotland than the rest of the UK that requires travellers from a "red list" of 33 countries to quarantine.
Travellers from countries on this list must self-isolate for 10 days on arrival in the UK along with their household.
First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said the measure "does not go far enough" and that the measure will be extended to all travellers "regardless of which country they have come from".
Sturgeon said the agreed UK approach only included countries where new variants of the coronavirus had already been identified and this was "too reactive" as a new variant will often have spread across borders by the time it has been identified through genomic sequencing.
She told MSPs on Tuesday: “The firm view of the Scottish Government is that in order to minimise the risk of new strains coming into the country, managed quarantine must be much more comprehensive.
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“I can therefore confirm today that we intend to introduce a managed quarantine requirement for anyone who arrives directly into Scotland, regardless of which country they have come from.”
She also said that she could not “unilaterally” impose such restrictions on people landing elsewhere in the UK and travelling to Scotland, but hoped the other administrations would work with the Scottish Government to reduce the number of people doing so.
In response to a question from Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer about quarantining all arrivals, Prime Minister Boris Johnson has refused to completely shut down the UK's borders by saying it is "not practical".
He said that due to 75% of the UK's medicines come into the country from the European mainland, 45% of food, while 250,000 businesses rely on imports.
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