Adjusting COVID-19 Reports for Countries’ Age Disparities: A Comparative Framework for Reporting Performances
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Abstract
Objectives
The COVID-19 outbreak has impacted distinct health care systems differently. While the rate of disease for COVID-19 is highly age-variant, there is no unified and age/gender-inclusive reporting taking place. This renders the comparison of individual countries based on their corresponding metrics, such as CFR difficult. In this paper, we examine cross-country differences, in terms of the age distribution of symptomatic cases, hospitalizations, intensive care unit (ICU) cases, and fatalities. In addition, we propose a new quality measure (called dissonance ratio) to facilitate comparison of countries’ performance in testing and reporting COVID-19 cases (i.e., their reporting quality).
Methods
By combining population pyramids with estimated COVID-19 age-dependent conditional probabilities, we bridge country-level incidence data gathered from different countries and attribute the variability in data to country demographics.
Results
We show that age-adjustment can account for as much as a 22-fold difference in the expected number of fatalities across different countries. We provide case, hospitalization, ICU, and fatality breakdown estimates for a comprehensive list of countries. Also, a comparison is conducted between countries in terms of their performance in reporting COVID-19 cases and fatalities.
Conclusions
Our research sheds light on the importance of and propose a methodology to use countries’ population pyramids for obtaining accurate estimates of the healthcare system requirements based on the experience of other, already affected, countries at the time of pandemics.
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SciScore for 10.1101/2020.08.31.20185223: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
Institutional Review Board Statement not detected. Randomization not detected. Blinding not detected. Power Analysis not detected. Sex as a biological variable not 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:While this approach provides a somewhat holistic view of the phenomenon, it also omits other country-level differences such as social isolation policies, prevention strategies, and the effectiveness of the individual healthcare …
SciScore for 10.1101/2020.08.31.20185223: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
Institutional Review Board Statement not detected. Randomization not detected. Blinding not detected. Power Analysis not detected. Sex as a biological variable not 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:While this approach provides a somewhat holistic view of the phenomenon, it also omits other country-level differences such as social isolation policies, prevention strategies, and the effectiveness of the individual healthcare systems (i.e., our research limitations). Future research may extend the proposed approach by involving such factors (upon the availability of data for them) in the calculation of conditional probabilities. Appendix Table 1 must be interpreted as a comparison tool for different countries’ exposure to the virus. Additionally, we propose an approach to compare countries’ performance in reporting COVID-19 cases. Clearly, not all countries have the same healthcare infrastructure to conduct enough number of tests to identify infected people. Despite these differences, official reports published by the governments of different countries are being used in a similar manner to study the characteristics of the novel coronavirus, which may cause significant bias to their findings. It is crucial then to provide a means to recognize those countries that perform better in running tests and reporting cases, thereby providing more reliable numbers for studying the pandemic. Appendix Table 2 lays out a base for comparing the reporting performance of the countries by taking into account their age disparities as well as the progress stage of the disease. Using that tool, researchers could have a better understanding of the accuracy of reported numbers by each country by ...
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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