Are women leaders significantly better at controlling the contagion?

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Abstract

Recent media articles have suggested that women-led countries are doing better in terms of their responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. We examine an ensemble of public health metrics to assess the control of COVID-19 epidemic in women- versus men-led countries worldwide based on data available up to June 3. The median of the distribution of median time-varying effective reproduction number for women- and men-led countries were 0.89 and 1.14 respectively with the 95% two-sample bootstrap-based confidence interval for the difference (women - men) being [- 0.34, 0.02]. In terms of scale of testing, the median percentage of population tested were 3.28% (women), 1.59% (men) [95% CI: (−1.29%, 3.60%)] with test positive rates of 2.69% (women) and 4.94% (men) respectively. It appears that though statistically not significant, countries led by women have an edge over countries led by men in terms of public health metrics for controlling the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic worldwide.

One Sentence Summary

We quantitatively compare countries led by women with countries led by men in terms of public health metrics for controlling the spread of the novel coronavirus.

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  1. SciScore for 10.1101/2020.06.06.20124487: (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 variableSince the world is full of data, we use data from the Johns Hopkins COVID-19 data repository (4) to carry out a two-group comparison of countries led by men and women.

    Table 2: Resources

    Software and Algorithms
    SentencesResources
    The list of countries with women leaders was retrieved from Wikipedia (5).
    Wikipedia
    suggested: (Wikipedia, RRID:SCR_004897)

    Results from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your code and 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.