Decreased incidence, virus transmission capacity, and severity of COVID-19 at altitude on the American continent
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Abstract
The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak in North, Central, and South America has become the epicenter of the current pandemic. We have suggested previously that the infection rate of this virus might be lower in people living at high altitude (over 2,500 m) compared to that in the lowlands. Based on data from official sources, we performed a new epidemiological analysis of the development of the pandemic in 23 countries on the American continent as of May 23, 2020. Our results confirm our previous finding, further showing that the incidence of COVID-19 on the American continent decreases significantly starting at 1,000 m above sea level (masl). Moreover, epidemiological modeling indicates that the virus transmission rate is lower in the highlands (>1,000 masl) than in the lowlands (<1,000 masl). Finally, evaluating the differences in the recovery percentage of patients, the death-to-case ratio, and the theoretical fraction of undiagnosed cases, we found that the severity of COVID-19 is also decreased above 1,000 m. We conclude that the impact of the COVID-19 decreases significantly with altitude.
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SciScore for 10.1101/2020.07.22.20160168: (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 data.
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:Finally, the limitations of the study include possible failures and delays in reporting cases as well as that our analysis does not consider the effect of different risk groups such as age, sex, comorbidities, and the possibility of reinfection. In conclusion, epidemiological analyses of the present work strongly suggest that the incidence of COVID-19 significantly decreases with altitude with a turning point at 1,000 masl. This effect seems to …
SciScore for 10.1101/2020.07.22.20160168: (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 data.
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:Finally, the limitations of the study include possible failures and delays in reporting cases as well as that our analysis does not consider the effect of different risk groups such as age, sex, comorbidities, and the possibility of reinfection. In conclusion, epidemiological analyses of the present work strongly suggest that the incidence of COVID-19 significantly decreases with altitude with a turning point at 1,000 masl. This effect seems to be related both to a decrease in the transmission capacity of the virus and to the physiological characteristics of altitude residents. Finally, our results suggest that knowledge of the mechanisms of physiological acclimatization to hypoxia may help to better understand the viral nature of SARS-CoV-2 as well as facilitate the discovery of new treatment strategies.
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.
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