Space-Time Patterns, Change, and Propagation of COVID-19 Risk Relative to the Intervention Scenarios in Bangladesh

  1. Arif Masrur
  2. Manzhu Yu
  3. Wei Luo
  4. Ashraf Dewan

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Abstract

The novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic continues to be a significant public health threat worldwide, particularly in densely populated countries such as Bangladesh with inadequate health care facilities. While early detection and isolation were identified as important non-pharmaceutical intervention (NPI) measures for containing the disease spread, this may not have been pragmatically implementable in developing countries due to social and economic reasons (i.e., poor education, less public awareness, massive unemployment). Hence, to elucidate COVID-19 transmission dynamics with respect to the NPI status—e.g., social distancing—this study conducted spatio-temporal analysis using the prospective scanning statistic at district and sub-district levels in Bangladesh and its capital, Dhaka city, respectively. Dhaka megacity has remained the highest-risk “active” cluster since early April. Lately, the central and south eastern regions in Bangladesh have been exhibiting a high risk of COVID-19 transmission. The detected space-time progression of COVID-19 infection suggests that Bangladesh has experienced a community-level transmission at the early phase (i.e., March, 2020), primarily introduced by Bangladeshi citizens returning from coronavirus epicenters in Europe and the Middle East. Potential linkages exist between the violation of NPIs and the emergence of new higher-risk clusters over the post-incubation periods around Bangladesh. Novel insights into the COVID-19 transmission dynamics derived in this study on Bangladesh provide important policy guidelines for early preparations and pragmatic NPI measures to effectively deal with infectious diseases in resource-scarce countries worldwide.

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  1. ScreenIT

    SciScore for 10.1101/2020.07.15.20154757: (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:
    However, some limitations can be addressed in future studies when more data become available. First, we only included confirmed cases reported by IEDCR. Inclusion of suspected and probable cases as additional covariates could improve the understanding of the true magnitude of risk. However, such data were not available or accessible at this point of time. Second, our analyses could not adjust for the age since age-specific data on COVID-19 cases was not available. However, experience worldwide has shown that COVID-19 can affect all age groups, although the recovery rate tends to vary among those groups (Desjardins et al., 2020). It could provide valuable insights into the space-time transmission rate and process through including age-specific data with other medical (pre-existing conditions) and socio-economic indicators (e.g. housing density, median income) at the local-level. Third, our findings may suffer from a low COVID-19 testing rate (513 per 1 million; WHO Bangladesh situation report, May 04, 2020) against its high density and size of the population in Bangladesh (Howlader & Khan, 2020; Nabi, M. S., 2020). However, as more missing and new data are added, the prospective scan statistic in this research will potentially detect new emerging clusters that would reveal different space-time transmission dynamics. Overall, the space-time emerging patterns and change in the relative risks of the COVID-19 outbreak identified here can be further compared and validated with loca...

    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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  2. Version published to 10.3390/ijerph17165911
  3. Version published to 10.1101/2020.07.15.20154757 on medRxiv