Background: We investigated a likely scenario of COVID-19 spreading in Brazil through the complex airport network of the country, for the 90 days after the first national occurrence of the disease. After the confirmation of the first imported cases, the lack of a proper airport entrance control resulted in the infection spreading in a manner directly proportional to the amount of flights reaching each city, following the first occurrence of the virus coming from abroad. Methodology: We developed a Susceptible-Infected-Recovered model divided in a metapopulation structure, where cities with airports were demes connected by the number of flights. Subsequently, we further explored the role of the Manaus airport for a rapid entrance of the pandemic into indigenous territories situated in remote places of the Amazon region. Results: The expansion of the SARS-CoV-2 virus between cities was fast, directly proportional to the city closeness centrality within the Brazilian air transportation network. There was a clear pattern in the expansion of the pandemic, with a stiff exponential expansion of cases for all the cities. The more a city showed closeness centrality, the greater was its vulnerability to SARS-CoV-2. Conclusions: We discussed the weak pandemic control performance of Brazil in comparison with other tropical, developing countries, namely India and Nigeria. Finally, we proposed measures for containing virus spreading taking into consideration the scenario of high poverty.

• Vegetation greenness is negatively but insignificantly associated with dengue incidence. • This association is stronger in socioeconomically vulnerable areas. • Improved vegetation quality has the potential to reduce dengue risk. • Openly accessible, coarse resolution environmental data have limitations in environmental health studies.

The spread of SARS-CoV-2 and the distribution of cases worldwide followed no clear biogeographic, climatic, or cultural trend. Conversely, the internationally busiest cities in all countries tended to be the hardest hit, suggesting a basic, mathematically neutral pattern of the new coronavirus early dissemination. We tested whether the number of flight passengers per time and the number of international frontiers could explain the number of cases of COVID-19 worldwide by a stepwise regression. Analysis were taken by 22 May 2020, a period when one would claim that early patterns of the pandemic establishment were still detectable, despite of community transmission in various places. The number of passengers arriving in a country and the number of international borders explained significantly 49% of the variance in the distribution of the number of cases of COVID-19, and number of passengers explained significantly 14.2% of data variance for cases per million inhabitants. Ecological neutral theory may explain a considerable part of the early distribution of SARS-CoV-2 and should be taken into consideration to define preventive international actions before a next pandemic.