The global viralization of policies to contain the spreading of the COVID-19 pandemic: Analyses of school closures and first reported cases
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Abstract
On January 30 th 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared a international health emergency due to the unprecedented phenomenon of COVID-19. After this declaration countries swiftly implemented a variety of health policies. In this work we examine how rapid countries responded to this pandemic using two events: the day in which the first case of COVID-19 was reported, and first day in which countries used school closure as one of the measures to avoid outbreaks. We also assessed how countries’ health systems, globalization, economic development, political systems, and economic integration to China, Republic of Korea and Italy increased the speed of adoption.
Methods
We compiled information from multiple sources, from December 31 st 2019 to June 1 st 2020, to trace when 172 countries reported their first COVID-19 case and implemented school closure to contain outbreaks. We applied cross-national Weibull survival analysis to evaluate the global speed of detection of first COVID-19 reported cases and school closure.
Results
Ten days after WHO declared COVID-19 to be an international emergency, relative to seven days from this declaration, countries were 28 (95% CI: 12–77) times more likely to report first COVID-19 cases and 42 (95% CI: 22–90) times more likely to close schools. One standard deviation increase in the epidemic security index rises the rate of report first cases by 37% (Hazard Ratio (HR) 1.37 (95% CI: 1.09–1.72) and delays the adoption for school closures by 36% (HR 0.64 (95% CI:0.50–0.82). One standard deviation increase in the globalization index augments the adoption for school closures by 74% (HR 1.74 (95% CI:1.34–2.24).
Conclusion
After the WHO declared a global emergency, countries were unprecedently acting very rapidly. While countries more globally integrated were swifter in closing schools, countries with better designed health systems to tackle epidemics were slower in adopting it. More studies are needed to assess how the speed of school closures and other policies will affect the development of the pandemic.
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SciScore for 10.1101/2020.06.11.20128892: (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:While this study has limitations it also opened new questions to better understand this phenomenon. First, since we only conceptualize countries which nationally determined the closures of schools as adoption cases, other analyses are needed to understand patterns of countries where closure of schools was decided at a subnational level, …
SciScore for 10.1101/2020.06.11.20128892: (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:While this study has limitations it also opened new questions to better understand this phenomenon. First, since we only conceptualize countries which nationally determined the closures of schools as adoption cases, other analyses are needed to understand patterns of countries where closure of schools was decided at a subnational level, like United States or the Russian Federation. However to check for the robustness of our results, we also carry out analyses in which we used the last date in which a state or province closed schools in countries where a national decision was not reached, and results were consistent (see analysis in Appendix 4). Second, while our preliminary analyses showed specific patterns of globalization to examine some aspects of the implication of COVID-19, we should emphasize the need for greater precision and granularity when examining more critically the processes of policy diffusion of school closures and first case reporting at the global level. Future analyses should attempt to better capture how actors, who transit international and nation social networks, debated, accepted and in some cases rejected the implementation of school closure within the context of other recommended policies but also more controversial ones such as full lockdowns. While findings of the current study highlight the great importance of time in the diffusion of policies, particularly in the context of a pandemic, these results call for a larger expansion of the way we unders...
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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