Air pollution, sociodemographic and health conditions effects on COVID-19 mortality in Colombia: An ecological study

This article has been Reviewed by the following groups

Read the full article See related articles

Discuss this preprint

Start a discussion What are Sciety discussions?

Abstract

No abstract available

Article activity feed

  1. SciScore for 10.1101/2020.07.22.20159293: (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 variableHalf of the population are women (51.2%), 77.1% of people live in urban areas and 68.2% of Colombians are between 15 and 64 years old.

    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 study has some limitations. First, it was conceived as an ecological study whose nature precludes the extrapolation of inferences from the empirical evaluation of hypothesis based on clusters (i.e., municipalities) to the individual level, therefore, the absence of a relationship between long-term exposure to PM2.5 and mortality among patients diagnosed with SARS-CoV-2 should at best be regarded as provisional. Second, exposure was determined using a model-based approach, that even though captured the heterogeneity of concentration across municipalities had a moderate correlation to land-based measurements in a selected sample of some of the largest ones, which might have partially attenuated any underlying association between PM2.5 and mortality. Third, in the absence of reliable NO2 and O3 long-term exposure estimations, we could not incorporate them into the analysis or evaluate the independent association of PM2.5 and mortality in the context of multi-pollutant models. Fourth, mortality data reflect fatal cases among patients with a confirmatory diagnosis of the infection, excluding deaths among undiagnosed individuals (due to either low testing rates or unreliable test results) and those occurring outside of hospitals. Systematic differences in the capability of municipalities to comprehensively and correctly identify and register deaths attributable to the infection could have biased our estimate of effect. Although this issue could not be directly addressed in the ...

    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.