Effects of 105 biological, socioeconomic, behavioural, and environmental factors on the risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection and a severe course of Covid-19: A prospective longitudinal study
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Abstract
The confirmed number of SARS-CoV-2 infections up to 30 August 2021 is 217 mil. worldwide but information about factors affecting the probability of infection or of a severe course of Covid-19 remains insufficient and often speculative. Only a small number of factors have been rigorously examined, mostly by retrospective or cross-sectional studies. We ran a preregistered study on 5,164 internet users who shared with us information about their exposure to 105 risk factors and reported being Covid negative before the beginning of the fourth wave of Covid-19 in the Czech Republic. After the fourth wave, in which 709 (13.7%) of participants were infected, we used a partial Kendall test controlled for sex, age, and urbanisation to compare the risk of infection and of a severe course of the disease in subjects who originally did and did not report exposure to particular risk factors. After the correction for multiple tests, we identified 13 factors – including male sex, lower age, blood group B, and the larger household size – that increased the risk of infection and 16 factors – including mask wearing, borreliosis in the past, use of vitamin D supplements, or rooibos drinking – that decreased it. We also identified 23 factors that increased the risk of a severe course of Covid-19 and 12 factors that decreased the risk.
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SciScore for 10.1101/2021.08.31.21262906: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
Ethics Consent: The invitation as well as the informed consent form on the first page of the questionnaire contained only the most general information about the aims of the study and contents of the questionnaire.
IRB: Data collection was performed in accordance with all relevant guidelines and regulations and the project, including the method of obtaining informed consent with participation in this anonymous study from all participants, was approved by the Institutional Review Board of the Faculty of Science, Charles University (Komise pro práci s lidmi a lidským materiálem Prírodovědecké Fakulty Univerzity Karlovy) — No. 2020/25).Sex as a biological variable not detected. Randomization not detected. SciScore for 10.1101/2021.08.31.21262906: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
Ethics Consent: The invitation as well as the informed consent form on the first page of the questionnaire contained only the most general information about the aims of the study and contents of the questionnaire.
IRB: Data collection was performed in accordance with all relevant guidelines and regulations and the project, including the method of obtaining informed consent with participation in this anonymous study from all participants, was approved by the Institutional Review Board of the Faculty of Science, Charles University (Komise pro práci s lidmi a lidským materiálem Prírodovědecké Fakulty Univerzity Karlovy) — No. 2020/25).Sex as a biological variable not detected. Randomization not detected. Blinding not detected. Power Analysis not detected. Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your data.
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:Strengths and limitations of the study: The most important advantage of the present study is its prospective longitudinal nature, its preregistration, and the large number of participants involved. The most serious limitation of the study is the fact that participants were self-selected and do not represent a typical sample of a general population. The use of nonrepresentative samples (i.e., samples with less variability than is found in general population) increases the likelihood of finding even weak significant effects if they in fact exist. On the other hand, this setup could also artificially increase or decrease the observed strength of detected effects (the amount of variability in an output variable explained by the factors under study) 42. In short, due to the specific composition of the population of study participants, we must be careful with generalisation of the findings. The second problem is that ‘survivorship bias’ could affect the results of some tests: Subjects who experienced a very severe course of Covid-19 were probably less likely to participate in the second part of the study (less likely to fill the second questionnaire) and those who died due to Covid-19 could not participate at all. In the Czech Republic, case mortality rate during the third and fourth waves of Covid-19 was about 1.9 % but the mean age of participants of our study was 43 and mortality in that age group was much lower. A low number of participants who died during the study, if any, co...
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.
Results from scite Reference Check: We found no unreliable references.
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