Effect of changing case definitions for COVID-19 on the epidemic curve and transmission parameters in mainland China: a modelling study
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SciScore for 10.1101/2020.03.23.20041319: (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:A limitation of our study is that we did not formulate an individual-based mechanistic transmission model, but used a simple model with exponential growth and then exponential decay (Figure 2). Further work could explore more complex dynamic models, allowing for the marginal effects of different types of interventions that were …
SciScore for 10.1101/2020.03.23.20041319: (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:A limitation of our study is that we did not formulate an individual-based mechanistic transmission model, but used a simple model with exponential growth and then exponential decay (Figure 2). Further work could explore more complex dynamic models, allowing for the marginal effects of different types of interventions that were introduced at different times towards the end of January 2020, in addition to accounting for the changes in case definitions. Analyses of the effects of interventions in China should be evaluated carefully if they do not account for the changes in case definitions. Second, we were only able to collect the data for the epidemic curve up to February 20, 2020 from published information. Therefore, we cannot evaluate the impact of changes in the case definition from version 5 to 6 and from version 6 to 7, although case numbers have been substantially declined after February 20. In conclusion, we have shown that changes in case definitions had a very substantial effect on the proportion of all infections identified as cases as time progressed, and therefore also had a very substantial effect on the epidemic curve. Ignoring those changes would have led to biased estimates of some key epidemiological parameters. We estimated that there could have been 232,000 cases by February 20 if, hypothetically, version 5 of the case definitions had been used throughout the epidemic. However this would be an underestimate of the number of infections up to that point becau...
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.
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SciScore for 10.1101/2020.01.25.919787: (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 has several limitations. First, the incidence date of confirmed cases in provinces except for Guangdong Province were estimated by a GAM modeling, which may lead to misclassification bias. However, the cross-validation test indicated a good performance of our GAM modeling. In addition, the R0 (3.8, 95%CI: 3.4-4.2) estimated for …
SciScore for 10.1101/2020.01.25.919787: (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 has several limitations. First, the incidence date of confirmed cases in provinces except for Guangdong Province were estimated by a GAM modeling, which may lead to misclassification bias. However, the cross-validation test indicated a good performance of our GAM modeling. In addition, the R0 (3.8, 95%CI: 3.4-4.2) estimated for imported cases in Guangdong Province, as a sample of the total confirmed cases nationwide, was comparable with the R0 estimated nationwide, indicating that our results are robust. Second, we are still in the early stage of this outbreak, and there is much uncertainty in epidemiological parameters that affects transmissibility of NCP. Sequential studies are urgently needed to fill-in these knowledge gaps. In summary, NCP may have a higher pandemic risk than SARS in 2003, and the efforts of containing the outbreak are taking into effect. Our findings indicate that rigorous control and prevention measures taken by Chinese governments on early detection, diagnosis and treatment of NCP cases are still needed to uphold until the time-varying reproduction number below one.
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:- No conflict of interest statement was detected. If there are no conflicts, we encourage authors to explicit state so.
- No funding statement was detected.
- No protocol registration statement was detected.
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