Directions of change in intrinsic case severity across successive SARS-CoV-2 variant waves have been inconsistent

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Abstract

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  1. SciScore for 10.1101/2022.03.24.22272915: (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: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).


    Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:
    Our study does, however, have some limitations. Firstly, we only include cases with sequenced genomes, and thus our sample predominantly includes cases with lower Ct, because these cases are more likely to have been sequenced. This is likely to be particularly important when the Ct distribution of infections differs between variants. Additionally, this limits us to the set of individuals who have been tested by PCR, likely to represent hospitalised patients more than those in the community. Also, our sample size was not large enough to adjust for all the factors we would have liked to (e.g. fitting a dose by vaccine brand interaction, given that different brands are known to provide differential protection against different variants[7,15,16]). There have been a series of other studies investigating each of the comparisons in our study individually. For Alpha versus previous variants, most previous studies have also estimated an increase in severity over extant diversity. A wide variety of end points have been used, 28-day mortality, hospitalisation, and an ordinal scale based around supplemental oxygen[17-27]. Our estimates are consistent with the majority of these studies. Our sample is smaller than was used in some of these studies, but we benefit from much higher resolution clinical data, and being able to control for comorbidities. When considering the Delta variant, two UK community analyses found that Delta (or an S-gene proxy) infections were associated with a higher r...

    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.
    • No protocol registration statement was detected.

    Results from scite Reference Check: We found no unreliable references.


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