Comparison of Transmissibility of Coronavirus Between Symptomatic and Asymptomatic Patients: Reanalysis of the Ningbo COVID-19 Data

  1. Guosheng Yin
  2. Huaqing Jin

Reviewed by

Read the full article See related articles

Discuss this preprint

Start a discussion What are Sciety discussions?

Listed in

Log in to save this article

Abstract

Since the outbreak of the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in December 2019, the coronavirus has spread all over the world at an unprecedented rate. The transmissibility of the coronavirus from asymptomatic patients to healthy individuals has received enormous attention. An important study using COVID-19 data from the city of Ningbo, China, was carried out to estimate and compare the transmission rates of the coronavirus by the symptomatic and asymptomatic patients. However, in the original analysis, the usual chi-square tests were unduly used for some contingency tables with small cell counts including zero, which may violate the assumptions for the chi-square test.

Objective

We reanalyze the data from the city of Ningbo with more appropriate statistical methods to draw more reliable and sound conclusions on the transmission rates of the coronavirus by the symptomatic and asymptomatic patients.

Methods

We excluded the cases associated with the super-spreader and adopted a more appropriate statistical method, including the permutation test and the Fisher exact test, to reanalyze the COVID-19 data from the city of Ningbo.

Results

After excluding the cases related to the super-spreader, the Fisher exact test yields a P value of .84, which indicates stronger evidence of no difference in the transmission rates compared with the original analysis. The odds ratio of the coronavirus transmission rates between the symptomatic and asymptomatic patients is 1.2 with a 95% confidence interval 0.5-2.8.

Conclusions

Through a more in-depth and comprehensive statistical analysis of the Ningbo data, we concluded that there is no difference in the transmission rates of coronavirus between symptomatic and asymptomatic patients.

Article activity feed

  1. ScreenIT

    SciScore for 10.1101/2020.04.02.20050740: (What is this?)

    Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

    Table 1: Rigor

    Institutional Review Board Statementnot detected.
    Randomizationnot detected.
    Blindingnot detected.
    Power Analysisnot detected.
    Sex as a biological variablenot detected.

    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: An explicit section about the limitations of the techniques employed in this study was not found. We encourage authors to address study limitations.

    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.

    About SciScore

    SciScore is an automated tool that is designed to assist expert reviewers by finding and presenting formulaic information scattered throughout a paper in a standard, easy to digest format. SciScore checks for the presence and correctness of RRIDs (research resource identifiers), and for rigor criteria such as sex and investigator blinding. For details on the theoretical underpinning of rigor criteria and the tools shown here, including references cited, please follow this link.

  2. Version published to 10.2196/19464
  3. Version published to 10.2196/preprints.19464
  4. Version published to 10.1101/2020.04.02.20050740 on medRxiv