Estimating weekly excess mortality at sub-national level in Italy during the COVID-19 pandemic
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SciScore for 10.1101/2020.06.08.20125211: (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:Strengths and weaknesses of the study: The specification of the model at municipality level, coupled with the inclusion of weekly non-linear terms, which are allowed to vary for each province, ensures that we can detect heterogeneity across space, while still retaining the flexibility to model the temporal pattern of mortality. This is …
SciScore for 10.1101/2020.06.08.20125211: (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:Strengths and weaknesses of the study: The specification of the model at municipality level, coupled with the inclusion of weekly non-linear terms, which are allowed to vary for each province, ensures that we can detect heterogeneity across space, while still retaining the flexibility to model the temporal pattern of mortality. This is consistent with typical modelling in disease mapping [22] and surveillance studies [23]. Additionally, we are framed in the same perspective as forecasting studies [24,25] and we take advantage of the Bayesian nature of our model to characterise the full uncertainty over the estimate of the rates to predict the weekly trends in 2020. At the same time, as our analysis estimates temporal trends for each municipality with the aim of predicting 2020 under the alternative scenario of the absence of a pandemic, we do not need to explicitly include covariates only varying in space. This is because their effect is captured by the municipality effect, which estimates the spatial heterogeneity in the rates. Nevertheless, we included weekly mean air temperature for each municipality to adjust the trends in mortality, which is crucial as 2020 was generally warmer than the previous years. Our model has some limitations. At the time of writing, cause-specific mortality for the year 2020 was not available. Thus, while we were able to estimate the non-COVID-19-related mortality, we cannot disentangle the specific causes behind it. At the same time, we were not...
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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