On the role of financial support programs in mitigating the SARS-CoV-2 spread in Brazil
This article has been Reviewed by the following groups
Listed in
- Evaluated articles (ScreenIT)
Abstract
Background
During 2020, there were no effective treatments or vaccines against SARS-CoV-2. The most common disease contention measures were social distance (social isolation), the use of face masks and lockdowns. In the beginning, numerous countries have succeeded to control and reduce COVID-19 infections at a high economic cost. Thus, to alleviate such side effects, many countries have implemented socioeconomic programs to fund individuals that lost their jobs and to help endangered businesses to survive.
Methods
We assess the role of a socioeconomic program, so-called “Auxilio Emergencial” (AE), during 2020 as a measure to mitigate the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak in Brazil. For each Brazilian State, we estimate the time-dependent reproduction number from daily reports of COVID-19 infections and deaths using a Susceptible-Exposed-Infected-Recovered-like (SEIR-like) model. Then, we analyse the correlations between the reproduction number, the amount of individuals receiving governmental aid, and the index of social isolation based on mobile phone information.
Results
We observed significant positive correlation values between the average values by the AE and median values of an index accounting for individual mobility. We also observed significantly negative correlation values between the reproduction number and this index on individual mobility. Using the simulations of a susceptible-exposed-infected-removed-like model, if the AE was not operational during the first wave of COVID-19 infections, the accumulated number of infections and deaths could be 6.5 (90% CI: 1.3–21) and 7.9 (90% CI: 1.5–23) times higher, respectively, in comparison with the actual implementation of AE.
Conclusions
Our results suggest that the AE implemented in Brazil had a significant influence on social isolation by allowing those in need to stay at home, which would reduce the expected numbers of infections and deaths.
Article activity feed
-
-
SciScore for 10.1101/2021.11.30.21267063: (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: Thank you for sharing your code and data.
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:It is worth mentioning that the proposed methodology has some limitations. We cannot assert that the presence or the absence of the AE was the main factor in promoting adherence to social isolation. Other factors, such as the fear of an emerging deadly disease, may have helped to convince people to stay at home at the beginning of the outbreak. Also, psychological saturation can be one of the main reasons why people leave isolation. …
SciScore for 10.1101/2021.11.30.21267063: (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: Thank you for sharing your code and data.
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:It is worth mentioning that the proposed methodology has some limitations. We cannot assert that the presence or the absence of the AE was the main factor in promoting adherence to social isolation. Other factors, such as the fear of an emerging deadly disease, may have helped to convince people to stay at home at the beginning of the outbreak. Also, psychological saturation can be one of the main reasons why people leave isolation. These factors are hard to include in a model and can affect the cause and effect relationship between socioeconomic programs and social isolation, as well as the disease spread. More sophisticated statistical tools can be used to investigate further such causal relationships, and they are the subject of future work. Different measures of mobility mainly based on mobile phone information were used to infer the real impact of initiatives like lockdowns on the contention of outbreaks [22, 24, 25, 26], as well as to describe the Spatio-temporal dynamics of the disease [19, 20, 23, 27, 28]. In the present work, we intended to shed light on the impact of a national socioeconomic program on disease spread contention, based on the premise that social isolation implies disease spread contention. As mentioned above, such a premise was widely tested and illustrated by our results.
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.
-
