Diagnostic serial interval as a novel indicator for contact tracing effectiveness exemplified with the SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19 outbreak in South Korea

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  1. SciScore for 10.1101/2020.05.05.20070946: (What is this?)

    Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

    Table 1: Rigor

    NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.

    Table 2: Resources

    No key resources detected.


    Results from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your code and data.


    Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:
    Our analysis has several limitations, the main one being that our data do not constitute a random sample of the population of infected individuals. As a result, we may suffer from selection bias in various ways. For example, the province of Daegue, which was severely affected by the epidemic, is strongly underrepresented. Also, some selection bias for shorter intervals is likely to exist, as infector-infectee pairs with shorter serial intervals may be identified more easily than those with longer serial intervals. Another limitation of our study is the potential dependency among observations. While the cluster bootstrap method accounts for dependencies between pairs with a common infector, it does not account for dependencies caused by long chains of infection or different viral subtypes with varying virulence and infectivity. In countries that managed to contain early outbreaks, concerns for a second wave are rising. Although the most powerful containment measures such as a lockdown, international travel bans and strict social distancing appear to have contributed to the containment of the earlier outbreaks, these measures are not sustainable in the long run. Contact tracing is an important tool that is sustainable, but its effectiveness cannot be merely assessed by the size of the epidemic, its growth rate or the mortality, as many other factors play a role in the dynamic of the epidemic. We therefore suggest that the diagnostic serial interval, in addition to other measure...

    Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.


    Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.


    Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.


    Results from rtransparent:
    • Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • Thank you for including a protocol registration statement.

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