Geographical identification of the vulnerable groups during COVID-19 crisis: the typhoon eye effect and its boundary conditions

  1. Pok Man Tang
  2. Stephen X. Zhang
  3. Chi Hon Li
  4. Feng Wei

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Abstract

Although some studies suggest the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is associated with negative consequences on physical health, our knowledge about the detrimental effects of COVID-19 on people’s mental health is still nascent. This study uses typhoon eye theory to offer insights in helping clinical psychiatrists to screen people with well-being issues during COVID-19 outbreak.

Methods

We collected survey data from working adults across different geographical areas in China on 20 and 21 February 2020 during the outbreak of COVID-19. The sample contains 308 working adults, who were in various parts of China, with varying distance to the epicenter of Wuhan.

Results

Individual adults’ distance to the epicenter was negatively associated with life satisfaction (β = −0.235, 95% CI −0.450 to −0.020, p = 0.032). This association between distance and life satisfaction was significant only for adults who were young or had smaller family sizes. For example, the negative relationship was strongest when the individuals were in the age bracket of 20 years old (15.7%; β = −0.703, 95% CI −1.098 to −0.307; p = 0.001) and single (32.3%; β = −0.767, 95% CI −1.125 to −0.408; p < 0.001).

Conclusion

Our results that people’s well-being deteriorates by the distance from the epicenter for specific groups of people help guide mental healthcare providers towards the regions that are further away from the epicenter in the ongoing COVID-19 outbreak. Meanwhile, our results indicate the practitioners should be cautious of using typhoon eye effect for individuals who were older or had a larger family size.

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  1. ScreenIT

    SciScore for 10.1101/2020.04.28.20083667: (What is this?)

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

    Table 1: Rigor

    Institutional Review Board StatementIRB: All respondents agreed to participate in the study, which was approved by the ethics committee at Tongji University (#20200211).
    Randomizationnot detected.
    Blindingnot detected.
    Power Analysisnot detected.
    Sex as a biological variablenot detected.

    Table 2: Resources

    Software and Algorithms
    SentencesResources
    We reported the descriptive and regression findings on unweighted data with STATA 16.0 by the statistical significance of p < 0.05 in Table 2.
    STATA
    suggested: (Stata, RRID:SCR_012763)

    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:
    Limitations: The context of this study has a clear epicenter of COVID-19, Wuhan, in China. However, not all countries have a single epicenter. For example, South Korea simultaneously had several epicenters 32, which opened new research avenues on the effect of geographical distance in the presence of multiple epicenters. In addition, the design was unable to capture the dynamic movement of the citizens across the cities in China over time to observe the fluctuations in the well-being over time. Lastly, our data was collected in China, a geographically large country, and it remains unclear whether the typhoon eye effects will generalize in other countries, most of which are smaller. The epicenter of Wuhan is in the center of the country, yet an epicenter of COVID-19 in the United States of American is New York State, which is geographically on the Northeastern. In that case, we suspect that the typhoon eye effects might play out differently (i.e., at different pace and patterns). Conclusion: Our research calls for clinical psychiatrists’ attention on people’s mental health during the pandemic of COVID-19, especially for those who are living away from the epicenter. We found that the further people are away from the epicenter, the lower are their reported life satisfaction. This relationship is stronger among younger individuals and individuals with smaller family sizes but not significant for older adults or those with bigger families. To conclude, our research helps provide i...

    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

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  2. Version published to 10.1101/2020.04.28.20083667v1 on medRxiv