Health‐seeking behaviors of patients with acute respiratory infections during the outbreak of novel coronavirus disease 2019 in Wuhan, China

  1. Juan Yang
  2. Hui Gong
  3. Xinhua Chen
  4. Zhiyuan Chen
  5. Xiaowei Deng
  6. Mengcen Qian
  7. Zhiyuan Hou
  8. Marco Ajelli
  9. Cecile Viboud
  10. Hongjie Yu

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Abstract

We conducted two surveys to evaluate the health‐seeking behaviors of individuals with acute respiratory infections (ARI) during the COVID‐19 outbreak in Wuhan, China. Among 351 participants reporting ARI (10.3%, 351/3,411), 36.5% sought medical assistance. Children were more likely to seek medical assistance than other age‐groups (66.1% vs. 28.0%‐35.1%). This population‐based study demonstrates that the majority of patients with ARI symptoms did not seek medical assistance during the COVID‐19 outbreak in Wuhan. These findings may be used to refine the estimates of disease burden and clinical severity of COVID‐19 and to plan for health resources allocation.

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  1. Version published to 10.1111/irv.12804
  2. ScreenIT

    SciScore for 10.1101/2020.05.05.20091553: (What is this?)

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

    Table 1: Rigor

    Institutional Review Board StatementIRB: The surveys were approved by the Institutional review board from School of Public Health, Fudan University (IRB#2020-01-0801).
    Consent: Informed consent was obtained from all respondents/parents of children before surveys.
    RandomizationFirst, we randomly dialed Wuhan mobile phone numbers to invite the participants through a computer-assisted interviewing system.
    Blindingnot detected.
    Power Analysisnot detected.
    Sex as a biological variableRandom dials/emails with proportional quota sampling were used to ensure that respondents were demographically representative of the general population, with quotas based on sex (female-to-male 1:1).

    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:
    Despite the aforementioned limitations, our study provides key metrics that can be instrumental to fill this gap.

    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

    SciScore is an automated tool that is designed to assist expert reviewers by finding and presenting formulaic information scattered throughout a paper in a standard, easy to digest format. SciScore checks for the presence and correctness of RRIDs (research resource identifiers), and for rigor criteria such as sex and investigator blinding. For details on the theoretical underpinning of rigor criteria and the tools shown here, including references cited, please follow this link.

  3. Version published to 10.1101/2020.05.05.20091553v1 on medRxiv