Approximate Reciprocal Relationship Between Two Cause-Specific Hazard Ratios in COVID-19 Data With Mutually Exclusive Events

  1. Sirin Cetin
  2. Ayse Ulgen
  3. Hakan Sivgin
  4. Wentian Li

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Abstract

COVID-19 survival data presents a special situation where not only the time-to-event period is short, but also the two events or outcome types, death and release from hospital, are mutually exclusive, leading to two cause-specific hazard ratios (csHR d and csHR r ). The eventual mortality/release outcome can also be analyzed by logistic regression to obtain odds-ratio (OR). We have the following three empirical observations concerning csHR d , csHR r and OR: (1) The magnitude of OR is an upper limit of the csHR d : | log(OR) | ≥ | log(csHR d )|. This relationship between OR and HR might be understood from the definition of the two quantities; (2) csHR d and csHR r point in opposite directions: log(csHR d )· log(csHR r ) < 0; This relation is a direct consequence of the nature of the two events; and (3) there is a tendency for a reciprocal relation between csHR d and csHR r : csHR d ∼ 1/csHR r . Though an approximate reciprocal trend between the two hazard ratios is in indication that the same factor causing faster death also lead to slow recovery by a similar mechanism, and vice versa, a quantitative relation between csHR d and csHR r in this context is not obvious. These resutls may help future analyses of COVID-19 data, in particular if the deceased samples are lacking.

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    SciScore for 10.1101/2021.04.22.21255955: (What is this?)

    Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

    Table 1: Rigor

    Ethicsnot detected.
    Sex as a biological variablenot detected.
    Randomizationnot detected.
    Blindingnot detected.
    Power Analysisnot 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).

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    • Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
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    • No protocol registration statement was detected.

    Results from scite Reference Check: We found no unreliable references.

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  2. Version published to 10.1101/2021.04.22.21255955 on medRxiv