Exploring Patterns and Trends in COVID-19 Exports from China, Italy, and Iran

  1. M.L. McHenry
  2. A. Soliman
  3. B. Dailey
  4. T. Chen
  5. J.J. Letterio
  6. G. Luo

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Abstract

This paper investigates COVID-19 exported cases by country and the time it takes between entry until case confirmation for the exported cases using publicly available data. We report that the average days from entry to confirmation is 7.7, 5.0 and 4.7 days for travelers from China, Italy, and Iran respectively. Approximately, one-third of all exported cases were confirmed within 3 days of entry suggesting these travelers were mildly symptomatic or symptomatic in arrival. We also found that earlier exported cases from each country had a longer time between entry to confirmation by an average of 3 days compared to later exports. Based upon our data, reported exported cases from South Korea were far fewer in comparison to those from China, Italy and Iran. Therefore, we suggest that careful monitoring of likely symptomatic travelers and better public awareness may lead to faster confirmation as well as reduced transmission of COVID-19 pandemic.

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  1. ScreenIT

    SciScore for 10.1101/2020.09.09.20190983: (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:
    While this is a notable limitation and it is possible that there are unmeasured differences between those we excluded and those in our analysis, we do not believe that their exclusion has biased our results, as these clusters had similar dates of confirmation and similar cluster sizes to those that were included (Supplementary Table 4). The only notable difference is that the cluster size was larger for exports from Italy with no date of entry, which was mostly due to a single cluster of 17 among the clusters with no date of entry. For China’s exported cases, the WHO tracked cases with travel history to China. Thus, our information for China is more complete and accurate [5]. However, our data did not include those who were evacuated due to COVID. While the inclusion of evacuees may have altered our results, people evacuated by their national government represent a different (likely lower) level of risk for transmission in their destination than those who travelled on their own. For Italy and Iran, we relied primarily on news outlets since there was no official tracking by any organization. Although our data is incomplete, we believe this study is the largest collection of current data on exports from Italy and Iran, two countries that initially had some of the highest burden of COVID-19 during the early stages of the pandemic and provide insight into how the virus was transmitted through at that time. We attempted to ascertain exported cases from South Korea but were surpris...

    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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  2. Version published to 10.1101/2020.09.09.20190983v1 on medRxiv