Management of Malaria in Children Younger Than 5 Years Old During Coronavirus Disease 2019 Pandemic in Sierra Leone: A Lesson Learned?
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Abstract
Growing evidences are showing the potential indirect effects of the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) on the health systems of low-resource settings, where diseases such as Tuberculosis, Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) and Malaria represent major killers. Therefore, we performed a retrospective study aimed to evaluate the impact of COVID-19 on Malaria programs in a peripheral region of Sierra Leone, previously involved by the Ebola outbreak in 2015, when malaria care have been impaired since local health systems were overwhelmed by Ebola cases. During COVID-19 in Sierra Leone, we did not notice a significant drop in malaria diagnosis in children, suggesting that a proactive approach in the management of malaria in endemic countries during COVID-19 may have had a positive impact. A comprehensive approach that include also educational activities to sensitize the local population, was useful to guarantee successful malaria diagnosis and treatment, and prevents excess of malaria deaths due to potential disruption of the local health systems related to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic.
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SciScore for 10.1101/2020.11.04.20225714: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
Institutional Review Board Statement not detected. Randomization not detected. Blinding not detected. Power Analysis not detected. Sex as a biological variable not detected. Table 2: Resources
Software and Algorithms Sentences Resources Descriptive and statistical analyses performed with STATA v16. STATAsuggested: (Stata, RRID:SCR_012763)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:We are aware that our report has several limitations to address. The retrospective nature is a limitation …
SciScore for 10.1101/2020.11.04.20225714: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
Institutional Review Board Statement not detected. Randomization not detected. Blinding not detected. Power Analysis not detected. Sex as a biological variable not detected. Table 2: Resources
Software and Algorithms Sentences Resources Descriptive and statistical analyses performed with STATA v16. STATAsuggested: (Stata, RRID:SCR_012763)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:We are aware that our report has several limitations to address. The retrospective nature is a limitation itself. Moreover, we have been able to collect absolute numbers, and no comprehensive epidemiological/demographic data from the health center are currently available, since the pandemic and the related restrictions are creating a higher workload for local workers and, at the same time, limits their possibility of interacting with other offices. Moreover, the restrictive measures lead to local organizational changes, including a reduction of the number of health workers concomitantly working at each health post, in order to reduce the risk of contagion of local workers, already extremely low in the area. Therefore, there were no enough human resources, and time, to allow us a timely and more detailed data collection. Also, ecological changes during the three study periods may have potentially influenced the trend of local malaria diagnoses, although currently there are no published evidences of unusually different rainy or dry seasons in the study period. Last, our data reflects the results of a national campaign in a single health center in Sierra Leone, therefore these data cannot be generalized to the whole country or, in general, to Sub-Saharan Africa. Although some difficulties in keeping effectively active Tuberculosis centers in sub-Saharan Africa has been already documented in Sierra Leone (4), in the case of Malaria in young children, the national health system ha...
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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