A Non-Linear Biostatistical Graphical Modeling of Preventive Actions and Healthcare Factors in Controlling COVID-19 Pandemic

  1. Faruq Abdulla
  2. Zulkar Nain
  3. Md. Karimuzzaman
  4. Md. Moyazzem Hossain
  5. Azizur Rahman

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Abstract

Background: With the insurgence of the COVID-19 pandemic, many people died in the past several months, and the situation is ongoing with increasing health, social, and economic panic and vulnerability. As most of the countries relying on different preventive actions to control the outcomes of COVID-19, it is necessary to boost the knowledge about the effectiveness of such actions so that the policymakers take their country-based appropriate actions. This study generates evidence of taking the most impactful actions to combat COVID-19. Objective: In order to generate community-based scientific evidence, this study analyzed the outcome of COVID-19 in response to different control measures, healthcare facilities, life expectancy, and prevalent diseases. Methods: It used more than a hundred countries’ data collected from different databases. We performed a comparative graphical analysis with non-linear correlation estimation using R. Results: The reduction of COVID-19 cases is strongly correlated with the earliness of preventive initiation. The apathy of taking nationwide immediate precaution measures has been identified as one of the critical reasons to make the circumstances worse. There is significant non-linear relationship between COVID-19 case fatality and number of physicians (NCC = 0.22; p-value ≤ 0.001), nurses and midwives (NCC = 0.17; p-value ≤ 0.001), hospital beds (NCC = 0.20; p-value ≤ 0.001), life expectancy of both sexes (NCC = 0.22; p-value ≤ 0.001), life expectancy of female (NCC = 0.27; p-value ≤ 0.001), and life expectancy of male (NCC = 0.19; p-value ≤ 0.001). COVID-19 deaths were found to be reduced with increased medical personnel and hospital beds. Interestingly, no association between the comorbidities and severity of COVID-19 was found excluding asthma, cancer, Alzheimer’s, and smoking. Conclusions: Enhancing healthcare facilities and early imposing the control measures could be valuable to prevent the COVID-19 pandemic. No association between COVID-19 and other comorbidities warranted further investigation at the pathobiological level.

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  1. Version published to 10.3390/ijerph18094491
  2. ScreenIT

    SciScore for 10.1101/2020.05.09.20096255: (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: 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 findings also suggest that the scientific education-based public awareness, intense health care systems preparation, limitation of large-scale public gathering, isolation, social distancing, testing, lockdown, and other preventive measures to prevent the pandemic were effective in many societies. These findings supported by several studies those were applicable for the previous epidemic (Bedford et al., 2020; CDC, 2020b, 2020a; Kandel et al., 2007; Lau et al., 2020; Platform, 2020; Qualls et al., 2017; Xiao and Torok, 2020). However, there is a scope of further study for identifying the real fact of spreading the disease in Iran as it takes almost every health care measure prior and immediately. On the contrary, the country with the least deaths and infections find their first infected person at minimum seventy-four days later than its origin at Wuhan, excluding Nepal. Almost all the countries found a colossal time to take immediate action and preventive measures for individuals. Most of them starting visa restriction, administrative emergency, limit public gathering, isolation policy, and partial lockdown before the identification of the first case. Nevertheless, only a few countries make full lockdown as well as implement a testing policy in an immediate stretch. Conversely, Nepal takes almost every preventive measure lately, but still, there is a shortage of COVID-19 patients, which may indicate the successful implication of testing policy as they have done the highest...

    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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  3. Version published to 10.1101/2020.05.09.20096255 on medRxiv