Risk Interactions of Coronavirus Infection across Age Groups after the Peak of COVID-19 Epidemic

  1. Xinhua Yu

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Abstract

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic has incurred significant disease burden worldwide, particularly on the elderly population. This study aims to explore how risks of coronavirus infection interact across age groups using data from South Korea. Methods: Daily new COVID-19 cases from 10 March to 30 April 2020 were scraped from online open sources. A multivariate vector autoregressive model for time series of count data was used to examine the risk interactions across age groups. Case counts from previous days were included as predictors to dynamically examine the change of risk patterns. Results: In South Korea, the risk of coronavirus infection among elderly people was significantly affected by other age groups. An increase in virus infection among people aged 20–39 was associated with a double risk of infection among elderly people. Meanwhile, an increase in virus infection among elderly people was also significantly associated with risks of infection among other age groups. The risks of infection among younger people were relatively unaffected by that of other age groups. Conclusions: Protecting elderly people from coronavirus infection could not only reduce the risk of infection among themselves but also ameliorate the risks of virus infection among other age groups. Such interventions should be effective and for the long term.

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  1. Version published to 10.3390/ijerph17145246
  2. Version published to 10.1101/2020.05.17.20105049v2 on medRxiv
  3. ScreenIT

    SciScore for 10.1101/2020.05.17.20105049: (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:
    This was consistent with our previous simulation study in which reducing contacts among elderly could reduce the virus infection and hospitalizations in the whole society [35] There were some limitations in this study. The most important one was that we relied on reported cases. The data from South Korea were more likely complete due to extensive contact tracing and mass testing. Furthermore, the case reporting date (or virus infection detection/lab confirmation date) was different from the virus infection date, and the average incubation period for SARS-CoV-2 was about 5 days [25]. The laudable efforts of extensive contact tracing and mass testing implemented by the South Korea government at the beginning of COVID-19 epidemic significantly reduced the reporting delays, and likely identified many cases before symptom onsets [17]. Therefore, the interval between virus infection and case reporting might be small. In addition, there were other factors such as gender, socio-economic status and neighborhood environment might also affect the risk of infection. Moreover, although we interpreted the results with action terms, they had no explicit causative meanings. For example, younger people tended to have milder or no symptoms (i.e., subclinical cases) if infected with virus [36–38]. Thus, it was possible that an increased number of detected cases among young people implied the existence of an increase in subclinical cases in the community who might unknowingly infect other people...

    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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  4. Version published to 10.1101/2020.05.17.20105049v1 on medRxiv