Estimating the effect of social inequalities on the mitigation of COVID-19 across communities in Santiago de Chile
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Abstract
We study the spatio-temporal spread of SARS-CoV-2 in Santiago de Chile using anonymized mobile phone data from 1.4 million users, 22% of the whole population in the area, characterizing the effects of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) on the epidemic dynamics. We integrate these data into a mechanistic epidemic model calibrated on surveillance data. As of August 1, 2020, we estimate a detection rate of 102 cases per 1000 infections (90% CI: [95–112 per 1000]). We show that the introduction of a full lockdown on May 15, 2020, while causing a modest additional decrease in mobility and contacts with respect to previous NPIs, was decisive in bringing the epidemic under control, highlighting the importance of a timely governmental response to COVID-19 outbreaks. We find that the impact of NPIs on individuals’ mobility correlates with the Human Development Index of comunas in the city. Indeed, more developed and wealthier areas became more isolated after government interventions and experienced a significantly lower burden of the pandemic. The heterogeneity of COVID-19 impact raises important issues in the implementation of NPIs and highlights the challenges that communities affected by systemic health and social inequalities face adapting their behaviors during an epidemic.
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SciScore for 10.1101/2020.10.08.20204750: (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:The present work comes with limitations. First, we focused only on the epidemic evolution within the Santiago Metropolitan Area and we overlooked both national and international importations after March 1st, 2020. While it is reasonable to assume that after this date the epidemic was largely sustained by the internal spreading (especially considering the various restrictions on international and national mobility), we acknowledge this …
SciScore for 10.1101/2020.10.08.20204750: (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:The present work comes with limitations. First, we focused only on the epidemic evolution within the Santiago Metropolitan Area and we overlooked both national and international importations after March 1st, 2020. While it is reasonable to assume that after this date the epidemic was largely sustained by the internal spreading (especially considering the various restrictions on international and national mobility), we acknowledge this as a possible limitation. Second, compared to other approaches [31–33], we considered a relatively simple disease dynamics. Lastly, we acknowledge that our mobile phone users’ sample was not selected to be representative of the whole population, but we know that Telefónica Movistar data can well represent the different socio-demographic groups of Santiago [34]. Overall, our study characterizes the unfolding of SARS-CoV-2 in one of the largest metropolitan areas in South America; a region that so far has received far less attention than others. It quantifies the unequal effects across communities of behavioral changes introduced by governmental measures as well as individual (re)actions and provides evidence that even small delays in the implementation of NPIs can have a significant impact on the unfolding of the epidemic.
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.
- No funding statement was detected.
- No protocol registration statement was detected.
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