Cost-effectiveness of public health strategies for COVID-19 epidemic control in South Africa: a microsimulation modelling study

This article has been Reviewed by the following groups

Read the full article

Discuss this preprint

Start a discussion What are Sciety discussions?

Abstract

No abstract available

Article activity feed

  1. SciScore for 10.1101/2020.06.29.20140111: (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:
    We chose intervention scenarios based on prior work supporting their efficacy for epidemic control, WHO recommendations, and particular relevance to settings with limitations in formal healthcare infrastructure.5–7 We did not limit the PCR testing availability – so that the total number of tests needed and associated costs could be estimated – and peak PCR use reached approximately 10,000-15,000 tests/day in the optimal strategies, marginally above established capacity in KwaZulu-Natal during the recent surge.21 We specified the model to reflect the number of available hospital and ICU beds in KwaZulu-Natal,14 and results were similar when we further restricted bed availability to that elsewhere in SSA.16 Contact tracing and community-based screening have been frequently used for case-finding in LMICs.22 Many SSA countries are thus theoretically poised to implement such interventions through established networks of community health workers. Finally, isolation centres, which are likely to require the greatest investment in new infrastructure, have been implemented successfully in response to Ebola epidemics in West Africa and the Democratic Republic of Congo, where healthcare resources are among the lowest in the world.23 South Africa has rapidly implemented and expanded COVID-19 related services in recent months, but further scale-up would be required to meet demand in some of our modelled scenarios.21,24 Isolation centres in our model are designed as housing facilities for p...

    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.

    About SciScore

    SciScore is an automated tool that is designed to assist expert reviewers by finding and presenting formulaic information scattered throughout a paper in a standard, easy to digest format. SciScore checks for the presence and correctness of RRIDs (research resource identifiers), and for rigor criteria such as sex and investigator blinding. For details on the theoretical underpinning of rigor criteria and the tools shown here, including references cited, please follow this link.