Food insecurity measurement and prevalence estimates during the COVID-19 pandemic in a repeated cross-sectional survey in Mexico

  1. Pablo Gaitán-Rossi
  2. Mireya Vilar-Compte
  3. Graciela Teruel
  4. Rafael Pérez-Escamilla

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Abstract

Objective:

To validate the telephone modality of the Latin American and Caribbean Food Security Scale (ELCSA) included in three waves of a phone survey to estimate the monthly household food insecurity prevalence during the COVID-19 pandemic in Mexico.

Design:

We examined the reliability and internal validity of the ELCSA scale in three repeated waves of cross-sectional surveys with Rasch models. We estimated the monthly prevalence of food insecurity in the general population and in households with and without children and compared them with a national 2018 survey. We tested concurrent validity by testing associations of food insecurity with socio-economic status and anxiety.

Setting:

ENCOVID-19 is a monthly telephone cross-sectional survey collecting information on the well-being of Mexican households during the pandemic lockdown. Surveys used probabilistic samples, and we used data from April ( n 833), May ( n 850) and June 2020 ( n 1674).

Participants:

Mexicans 18 years or older who had a mobile telephone.

Results:

ELCSA had an adequate model fit and food insecurity was associated, within each wave, with more poverty and anxiety. The COVID-19 lockdown was associated with an important reduction in food security, decreasing stepwise from 38·9 % in 2018 to 24·9 % in June 2020 in households with children.

Conclusions:

Telephone surveys were a feasible strategy to monitor reductions in food security during the COVID-19 lockdown.

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  1. ScreenIT

    SciScore for 10.1101/2020.08.04.20167650: (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 data.

    Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:
    A limitation of ENCOVID-19, however, was the insufficient inclusion of persons living in rural and isolated localities due to lower mobile phone coverage. Since these communities have higher extreme poverty levels than urban enclaves in Mexico (29), lower coverage of these areas may have led to an underestimation of HFI. In spite of this limitations, thanks to ENCOVID-19, Mexico has been able to rapidly and efficiently monitor changes in food security in the general population and diverse vulnerable locations. A necessary next step is thus to further study the determinants of HFI during and post-pandemic in low-income households that are being affected the most, such as single women headed household or caregivers working in the informal sector. Analyzing these determinants will be key to designing adequate public policies. The validity of ELCSA was also examined in its association with other measures. Households with low SES reported a considerably higher prevalence of food insecurity than those with high SES. Remarkably, food insecurity was reported in 10% to 26% of households in the middle of the SES scale. This means that the pandemic is striking households along the SES continuum, but it is hitting harder the ones with lower SES. HFI was also associated with anxiety. Individuals living under conditions of moderate and severe HFI had more than double the anxiety levels than food secure households. These results confirm the expected psycho-emotional toll of experiencing HFI...

    Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.

    Results from Barzooka: We found bar graphs of continuous data. We recommend replacing bar graphs with more informative graphics, as many different datasets can lead to the same bar graph. The actual data may suggest different conclusions from the summary statistics. For more information, please see Weissgerber et al (2015).

    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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  2. Version published to 10.1017/s1368980020004000
  3. Version published to 10.1101/2020.08.04.20167650v1 on medRxiv