The effect of early-stage public health policies in the transmission of COVID-19 for South American countries
This article has been Reviewed by the following groups
Listed in
- Evaluated articles (ScreenIT)
Abstract
Objectives. The analysis of transmission dynamics is crucial to determine whether mitigation or suppression measures reduce the spread of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). This study sought to estimate the basic (R 0 ) and time-varying (R t ) reproduction number of COVID-19 and contrast the public health measures for ten South American countries.
Methods. Data was obtained from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control. Country-specific R 0 values during the first two weeks of the outbreak and R t values after 90 days were estimated.
Results. Countries used a combination of isolation, physical distancing, quarantine, and community-wide containment measures to staunch the spread of COVID-19 at different points in time. R0 ranged from 1.52 (95% confidence interval: 1.13-1.99) in Venezuela to 3.83 (3.04-4.75) in Chile, whereas Rt after 90 days ranged from 0.71 (95% credible interval: 0.39-1.05) in Uruguay to 1.20 (1.19-1.20) in Brazil. Different R 0 and R t values may be related to the testing capacity of each country.
Conclusion. R 0 in the early phase of the outbreak varied across the South American countries. The public health measures adopted in the initial period of the pandemic appear to have reduced R t over time in each country, albeit to different levels.
Article activity feed
-
-
-
SciScore for 10.1101/2020.08.09.20149286: (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 code.
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:Our study has some limitations to address. Although we used national reports of COVID-19 cases, underreporting is likely, and difficult to quantify. True case identification depends on the testing capacity to detect both symptomatic and asymptomatic patients, which is difficult in any country and likely impaired in SA countries. For instance, Venezuela has been under political, socioeconomic, and public health instability before the COVID-19 …
SciScore for 10.1101/2020.08.09.20149286: (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 code.
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:Our study has some limitations to address. Although we used national reports of COVID-19 cases, underreporting is likely, and difficult to quantify. True case identification depends on the testing capacity to detect both symptomatic and asymptomatic patients, which is difficult in any country and likely impaired in SA countries. For instance, Venezuela has been under political, socioeconomic, and public health instability before the COVID-19 pandemic, shown through the cessation of publishing of public health statistics since 2016 from their Ministry of Health (27). Moreover, Brazil’s president Jair Bolsonaro downplayed COVID-19 regarding it as a benign disease and through avoiding prompt action to address the pandemic (28). These instances may have impaired proper case detection and led to a suppression of information as previous reports suggest (28, 29). Second, we did not calculate the case-fatality ratio. During the current course of the pandemic in SA countries, the estimation of this metric is biased for underreporting of cases and time lag between the notification of cases and deaths; this analysis is better suited for a post-pandemic period (30, 31). Third, there are issues arising from the model specification for serial interval. For instance, we assumed the same serial interval distribution for all countries at all points in time, even though these should be space- and time-dependent, as serial interval distributions vary throughout an epidemic or pandemic (24). Als...
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.
-