Characterizing superspreading events and age-specific infectiousness of SARS-CoV-2 transmission in Georgia, USA
This article has been Reviewed by the following groups
Listed in
- Evaluated articles (ScreenIT)
Abstract
There is still considerable scope for advancing our understanding of the epidemiology and ecology of COVID-19. In particular, much is unknown about individual-level transmission heterogeneities such as superspreading and age-specific infectiousness. We statistically synthesize multiple valuable data streams, including surveillance data and mobility data, that are available during the current COVID-19 pandemic. We show that age is an important factor in the transmission of the virus. Superspreading is ubiquitous over space and time, and has particular importance in rural areas and later stages of an outbreak. Our results improve our understanding of the natural history of the virus and have important implications for designing optimal control measures.
Article activity feed
-
SciScore for 10.1101/2020.06.20.20130476: (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 a number of limitations. First of all, due to the lack of widely available testings, the under-reporting rate was almost surely high during earlier phases of the pandemic. Also, severity of symptoms (and hence reporting rates) may vary among different age groups. We explore the robustness of our main results towards these …
SciScore for 10.1101/2020.06.20.20130476: (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 a number of limitations. First of all, due to the lack of widely available testings, the under-reporting rate was almost surely high during earlier phases of the pandemic. Also, severity of symptoms (and hence reporting rates) may vary among different age groups. We explore the robustness of our main results towards these possible under-reporting scenarios in the Sensitivity Analysis. Reassuringly, our main conclusions appears to be largely robust. Second, with the lack of detailed individual movement data, our model implicitly assumes transmission occurred mostly near people’s homes. Nevertheless, most activities (hence transmissions) were likely to have clustered around homes due to the increasing public concern over the pandemic and announcements of shelter-in-place order back in March and April. For example, Fulton county, one of the counties with the highest number of cases, closed its school as early as March 10, about one month before the shelter-in-place order on April 3. As activities outside homes (e.g. gatherings at pubs) may tend to facilitate clusters of transmissions and super-spreading, our model may have thus underestimated both the infectiousness of younger adults who are more socially active and the degree of super-spreading. Third, we only consider modelling age-specific infectiousness in two age groups (<60 and >=60). The model would tend to be over-parameterized if we further break down the age groups that we have considered (e.g. by having ...
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.
- Thank you for including a protocol registration statement.
-
-
