Estimating the COVID-19 Prevalence in Spain With Indirect Reporting via Open Surveys
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Abstract
During the initial phases of the COVID-19 pandemic, accurate tracking has proven unfeasible. Initial estimation methods pointed toward case numbers that were much higher than officially reported. In the CoronaSurveys project, we have been addressing this issue using open online surveys with indirect reporting. We compare our estimates with the results of a serology study for Spain, obtaining high correlations (R squared 0.89). In our view, these results strongly support the idea of using open surveys with indirect reporting as a method to broadly sense the progress of a pandemic.
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SciScore for 10.1101/2021.01.29.20248125: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
Institutional Review Board Statement IRB: The study design was reviewed and approved by the ethics committee of the IMDEA Networks Institute.
Consent: The survey includes an informed consent.Randomization not detected. Blinding not detected. Power Analysis not detected. Sex as a biological variable not detected. Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your code and data.
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:Our study presents a number of limitations. Firstly, as presented in Table 1, our number of responses in some regions was limited (e.g., 9 responses in La Rioja or 16 in Navarra and …
SciScore for 10.1101/2021.01.29.20248125: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
Institutional Review Board Statement IRB: The study design was reviewed and approved by the ethics committee of the IMDEA Networks Institute.
Consent: The survey includes an informed consent.Randomization not detected. Blinding not detected. Power Analysis not detected. Sex as a biological variable not detected. Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your code and data.
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:Our study presents a number of limitations. Firstly, as presented in Table 1, our number of responses in some regions was limited (e.g., 9 responses in La Rioja or 16 in Navarra and Cantabria). Our own analysis suggests this is not enough to offer reliable data for these three regions. Additionally, our criteria to eliminate outliers is heuristic, and may change in the future as we collect more data. Nevertheless, despite these limitations, the estimates obtained in CoronaSurveys show high correlation with serology tests. Moreover, since the underestimation of our estimates over all regions is homogeneous, and consistent with the one third fraction of asymptomatic reported by Pollán et al. (12), these estimates can be “corrected” to provide an accurate cumulative number of cases for each region. We will further evaluate the robustness of our model as Pollán et al. publish the results of their three additional serology studies. In summary, we believe these results strongly support using open surveys with indirect reporting as a method to broadly sense the progress of a pandemic.
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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