Modeling the effect of the national borders in the spread of COVID-19: A case study of the Saxony-Czechia border region

COVID-19 serves as an opportunity to apply scientific methodologies from various fields to better understand the nature of the spread. In this paper, we are specifically looking into the effect of the presence/absence of national borders on the spread of the disease. We work with the dataset aggregated from the seven-day incidence in the municipalities in Saxony, and Czechia. We further apply the regression model, where a metric to estimate the potential causality of incidence growth in each of two municipalities is dependent on the distance between them, their population ratio, and the existence of the national border. Our preliminary results showed that the effect of the borders is very strong in most of the study areas.