Relationship between COVID-19 death toll doubling time and national BCG vaccination policy

  1. Yutaka Akiyama
  2. Takashi Ishida

Reviewed by

Read the full article

Listed in

Log in to save this article

Abstract

In this manuscript, we showed a statistically significant difference of the doubling times of the death toll between the group of countries with national universal Bacillus Calmette-Guerin (BCG) vaccination and the group without it for recent years. Based on a statistical test, the distributions of the doubling time of these two groups were significantly different (p=0.007). Miller et al. reported the relationship between BCG vaccination and mortality for COVID-19 based on deaths per million inhabitants. However, they did not take into account the differences in COVID-19 detection rates among the countries and the epidemic stages of the countries. Therefore we used a doubling time of the death toll as a more stable indicator instead. We also investigated the dependency of the BCG strains. Among the 42 BCG-vaccinated countries, the median doubling time of the eight countries using “Tokyo 172-1” strain at least partially (Japan, Iraq, Malaysia, South Korea, Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Bangladesh) was 7.2 days, and that of the other 34 vaccinated countries was 5.5 days. Their distributions were also significantly different (p=0.026).

Article activity feed

  1. ScreenIT

    SciScore for 10.1101/2020.04.06.20055251: (What is this?)

    Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

    Table 1: Rigor

    Institutional Review Board Statementnot detected.
    Randomizationnot detected.
    Blindingnot detected.
    Power Analysisnot detected.
    Sex as a biological variablenot detected.

    Table 2: Resources

    No key resources detected.

    Results from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your data.

    Results from LimitationRecognizer: An explicit section about the limitations of the techniques employed in this study was not found. We encourage authors to address study limitations.

    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.

  2. Version published to 10.1101/2020.04.06.20055251v2 on medRxiv
  3. Version published to 10.1101/2020.04.06.20055251v1 on medRxiv