The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on rabies reemergence in Latin America: The case of Arequipa, Peru
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Abstract
In Latin America, there has been tremendous progress towards eliminating canine rabies. Major components of rabies elimination programs leading to these successes have been constant and regular surveillance for rabid dogs and uninterrupted yearly mass dog vaccination campaigns. Unfortunately, vital measures to control COVID-19 have had the negative trade-off of jeopardizing these rabies elimination and prevention activities. We aimed to assess the effect of interrupting canine rabies surveillance and mass dog vaccination campaigns on rabies trends. We built a deterministic compartment model of dog rabies dynamics to create a conceptual framework for how different disruptions may affect rabies virus transmission. We parameterized the model for conditions found in Arequipa, Peru, a city with active rabies virus transmission. We examined our results over a range of plausible values for R 0 (1.36–2.0). Also, we prospectively evaluated surveillance data during the pandemic to detect temporal changes. Our model suggests that a decrease in canine vaccination coverage as well as decreased surveillance could lead to a sharp rise in canine rabies within months. These results were consistent over all plausible values of R 0 . Surveillance data from late 2020 and early 2021 confirms that in Arequipa, Peru, rabies cases are on an increasing trajectory. The rising rabies trends in Arequipa, if indicative to the region as whole, suggest that the achievements made in Latin America towards the elimination of dog-mediated human rabies may be in jeopardy.
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SciScore for 10.1101/2020.08.06.20169581: (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:These effects are compounded by the limitations of our model; it is a deterministic model and does not capture the changeable nature of outbreaks. Next steps include building a more flexible, stochastic model around the current framework. Our model demonstrates that the effects of stopping or pausing rabies prevention activities could …
SciScore for 10.1101/2020.08.06.20169581: (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:These effects are compounded by the limitations of our model; it is a deterministic model and does not capture the changeable nature of outbreaks. Next steps include building a more flexible, stochastic model around the current framework. Our model demonstrates that the effects of stopping or pausing rabies prevention activities could have serious effects on future cases of canine rabies, and consequently, on the risk of human rabies. Given that COVID-19 will continue to challenge public health departments in the short- and medium-term, it is essential to create a strategy for rabies surveillance and prevention during the COVID-19 pandemic. This strategy should consider new approaches to dog vaccination that can accommodate social distancing and other COVID-19 prevention measures. New dog vaccination approaches, even with suboptimal coverage, could prevent canine rabies cases in the short term. However, an uninterrupted optimal level must be reached for the long-term goal of elimination, as has been shown previously (57, 58). The epidemiological model presented in this paper indicates that decreasing or stopping rabies programming during the pandemic could have downstream effects on rabies in Peru, and likely in the region, and even threatens to undo the remarkable achievements in decreasing rabies cases over the past several decades. This outcome would join a number of other disease spikes that occurred following natural disasters or public health crises. However, it is an o...
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.
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