Work-related and personal predictors of COVID-19 transmission: evidence from the UK and USA
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Abstract
To develop evidence of work-related and personal predictors of COVID-19 transmission.
Setting and respondents
Data are drawn from a population survey of individuals in the USA and UK conducted in June 2020.
Background methods
Regression models are estimated for 1467 individuals in which reported evidence of infection depends on work-related factors as well as a variety of personal controls.
Results
The following themes emerge from the analysis. First, a range of work-related factors are significant sources of variation in COVID-19 infection as indicated by self-reports of medical diagnosis or symptoms. This includes evidence about workplace types, consultation about safety and union membership. The partial effect of transport-related employment in regression models makes the chance of infection over three times more likely while in univariate analyses, transport-related work increases the risk of infection by over 40 times in the USA. Second, there is evidence that some home-related factors are significant predictors of infection, most notably the sharing of accommodation or a kitchen. Third, there is some evidence that behavioural factors and personal traits (including risk preference, extraversion and height) are also important.
Conclusions
The paper concludes that predictors of transmission relate to work, transport, home and personal factors. Transport-related work settings are by far the greatest source of risk and so should be a focus of prevention policies. In addition, surveys of the sort developed in this paper are an important source of information on transmission pathways within the community.
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SciScore for 10.1101/2020.07.13.20152819: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
Institutional Review Board Statement not detected. Randomization not detected. Blinding not detected. Power Analysis not detected. Sex as a biological variable On the other hand, the concentration of women in caring professions may place some groups of women at greater risk. 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:While this study adds some novel variables and evidence to the understanding of community transmission within the US and UK, several limitations should be mentioned. In the first place, it would be useful to have larger sample sizes …
SciScore for 10.1101/2020.07.13.20152819: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
Institutional Review Board Statement not detected. Randomization not detected. Blinding not detected. Power Analysis not detected. Sex as a biological variable On the other hand, the concentration of women in caring professions may place some groups of women at greater risk. 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:While this study adds some novel variables and evidence to the understanding of community transmission within the US and UK, several limitations should be mentioned. In the first place, it would be useful to have larger sample sizes particularly for observations referring substantially to behaviour in a lockdown period. In addition, it would be helpful to have repeated observations so that more could be said about changes over time as well as causality: indeed, it would be useful to have patient or lay input into the development of a fuller set of predictors based on possible causal mechanisms. Furthermore, it was not possible to audit responses. Finally, this study was not designed to engage strongly with the issues of race as they have emerged. The database contains mainly those who report first onset of symptoms early on, possible because those still ill were less inclined to participate in surveys. The higher levels of infections of Whites in the survey is consistent with a pattern of infection in which more affluent population members are exposed first to spread via international sources from Europe and elsewhere, while internal transmission then proceeded more rapidly amongst the poor often at greater risk and less able to take avoidance measures. These limits aside, the study implicates transport related employment and travel in various ways with transmission risk, identifies novel employment related predictors of infection risk, and provides evidence of ways in which ...
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.
- Thank you for including a protocol registration statement.
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SciScore for 10.1101/2020.07.13.20152819: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
Institutional Review Board Statement not detected. Randomization not detected. Blinding not detected. Power Analysis not detected. Sex as a biological variable On the other hand, the concentration of women in caring professions may place some groups of women at greater risk. Table 2: Resources
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 is not a substitute for expert review. SciScore checks for the presence and correctness of RRIDs (research resource identifiers) in the manuscript, and detects sentences that appear …
SciScore for 10.1101/2020.07.13.20152819: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
Institutional Review Board Statement not detected. Randomization not detected. Blinding not detected. Power Analysis not detected. Sex as a biological variable On the other hand, the concentration of women in caring professions may place some groups of women at greater risk. Table 2: Resources
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 is not a substitute for expert review. SciScore checks for the presence and correctness of RRIDs (research resource identifiers) in the manuscript, and detects sentences that appear to be missing RRIDs. SciScore also checks to make sure that rigor criteria are addressed by authors. It does this by detecting sentences that discuss criteria such as blinding or power analysis. SciScore does not guarantee that the rigor criteria that it detects are appropriate for the particular study. Instead it assists authors, editors, and reviewers by drawing attention to sections of the manuscript that contain or should contain various rigor criteria and key resources. For details on the results shown here, including references cited, please follow this link.
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