Massive social protests amid the pandemic in selected Colombian cities: Did they increase COVID-19 cases?

  1. José Moreno-Montoya
  2. Laura A. Rodríguez-Villamizar
  3. Alvaro J. Idrovo

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Abstract

Background

Since April 28, 2021, in Colombia there are social protests with numerous demonstrations in various cities. The aim of this study was to assess the effect of social protests on the number and trend of the confirmed COVID-19 cases in some selected Colombian cities where social protests had more intensity.

Methods

We performed and interrupted time-series analysis (ITSA) and Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) models, based on the confirmed COVID-19 cases in Colombia, between March 1 and May 15, 2021, for Bogotá, Cali, Barranquilla, Medellín, and Bucaramanga. The ITSA models estimated the effect of social demonstrations on the number and trend of cases for each city by using Newey-West standard errors. ARIMA models assessed the overall pattern of the series and effect of the intervention. We considered May 2, 2021, as the intervention date for the analysis, five days after social demonstrations started in the country.

Findings

During the study period the number of cases by city was 1,014,815 for Bogotá, 192,320 for Cali, 175,269 for Barranquilla, 311,904 for Medellín, and 62,512 for Bucaramanga. Heterogeneous results were found among cities. Only for the cities of Cali and Barranquilla statistically significant changes in trend of the number of cases were obtained after the intervention: positive in the first city, negative in the second one. None ARIMA models show evidence of abrupt changes in the trend of the series for any city and intervention effect was only significant for Bucaramanga.

Interpretation

Social protests had a heterogeneous effect on the number and trend of COVID-19 cases. Different effects might be related to the epidemiologic moment of the pandemic and the characteristics of the social protests. Assessing the effect of social protests within a pandemic is complex and there are several methodological limitations. Further analyses are required with longer time-series data.

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    SciScore for 10.1101/2021.06.16.21258989: (What is this?)

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

    Table 1: Rigor

    NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.

    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:
    The results of this study should be interpreted with caution, considering the limitations inherent in the data and statistical methods used. First, temporal changes in the number of confirmed cases of SARS-CoV-2 infection should not be interpreted as changes in viral transmission. Data available in Colombia do not allow this inference to be made since public health surveillance has not been adequate to identify all the contacts of each new case that is reported. It is consequence of the way in which public health surveillance is carried out, which privilege symptomatic cases and has limitations in contact tracing, as described by Vecino-Ortiz et al.20 Thus, confirmed cases might not be representative of transmission due to underreporting. Second, it is not clear whether there was non-differential report during the study time. The different moments of the pandemic in each city make it difficult to identify whether the case identification strategies can be comparable. Available data do not allow a rigorous evaluation of this issue. Third, data used in the analysis only included a two-weeks period after the incubation period and later effects should be evaluated later in time. However, we recognize that it is difficult to test later effects given that there were events, such as the celebration of Mother’s Day (first Sunday of the month; in this year May 9, 2021), that made a rigorous evaluation more difficult. Fourth, most participants in social protests are young people, and vi...

    Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.

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    Results from rtransparent:
    • 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 10.1101/2021.06.16.21258989v1 on medRxiv