Easing social distancing index after COVID-19 pandemic

  1. Sam Li-Sheng Chen
  2. Amy Ming-Fang Yen
  3. Chao-Chih Lai
  4. Chen-Yang Hsu
  5. Hsiu-Hsi Chen

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Abstract

Context

Easing social distancing (ESD) is a global public health issue in post-pandemic period of COVID-19 and requires a simple index for real time assessment.

Objective

We aimed to develop a simple index for ESD to quantify the impacts of social distancing for reducing confirmed infected cases, optimal triage and care of patients for recovery, and critical care capacity for reducing death from COVID-19.

Design, Setting, and Participants

Data on the retrospective cohort of 185 countries with reported numbers on confirmed cases, recovery, and death from COVID-19 were retrieved from publicity available repository. Up to May 31, a total of 5,844,136 confirmed cases, 2,639,961 recovered, and 327,487 deaths were reported globally.

Main Outcome Measures

The ESD index measured by cumulative number of COVID-19 cases and recovery and case-fatality rate.

Results

We developed a simple index for the guidance of easing social distancing (ESD). If the ESD index is less than 1, ESD would be considered. The global ESD index declined from 3.87 at peak in March to 1.35 by the end of May, consisting of 56.76% countries/regions (105/185) with the ESD lower than one.

Conclusion and Relevance

This simple ESD index provides a quantitative assessment on whether and when to ease social distancing from local to global community.

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    SciScore for 10.1101/2020.06.11.20128165: (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 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.

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  2. Version published to 10.1101/2020.06.11.20128165v1 on medRxiv