Estimation of the Number of General Anesthesia Cases Based on a Series of Nationwide Surveys on Twitter during COVID-19 Pandemic in Japan: A Statistical Analysis
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Abstract
Background and objectives: Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), has spread to more than 200 countries. In light of this situation, the Japanese Government declared a state of emergency in seven regions of Japan on 7 April 2020 under the provisions of the law. The medical care delivery system has been under pressure. Although various surgical societies have published guidelines on which to base their surgical decisions, it is not clear how general anesthesia has been performed and will be performed in Japan. Materials and Methods: One of the services provided by the social network service Twitter is a voting function—Twitter Polls—through which anonymous surveys were conducted. We analyzed the results of a series of surveys 17 times over 22 weeks on Twitter on the status of operating restrictions using quadratic programming to solve the mathematical optimizing problem, and public data provided by the Japanese Government were used to estimate the current changes in the number of general anesthesia performed in Japan. Results: The minimum number of general anesthesia cases per week was estimated at 67.1% compared to 2015 on 27 April 2020. The timeseries trend was compatible with the results reported by the Japanese Society of Anesthesiologists (correlation coefficient r = 0.69, p < 0.001). Conclusions: The number of general anesthesia was reduced up to two-thirds during the pandemic of COVID-19 in Japan and was successfully quantitatively estimated using a quick questionnaire on Twitter.
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SciScore for 10.1101/2020.05.08.20094979: (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 data.
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:It is difficult to adequately control for the level of limitation of usual surgical care during the spread of COVID-19. It is determined by adherence to official guidelines, restrictions on medical supplies and medical staff, and the level of need for surgery. However, because circumstances can change quickly, it is often determined with reference to the extent of restrictions at a medical facility other than the home facility. The staged …
SciScore for 10.1101/2020.05.08.20094979: (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 data.
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:It is difficult to adequately control for the level of limitation of usual surgical care during the spread of COVID-19. It is determined by adherence to official guidelines, restrictions on medical supplies and medical staff, and the level of need for surgery. However, because circumstances can change quickly, it is often determined with reference to the extent of restrictions at a medical facility other than the home facility. The staged approach—recommended by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and the American College of Surgeons (ACS)—is used as a guide to determine how to perform surgery in situations where the preservation of ventilators and personal protective equipment is necessary, and the ICU has been compromised—or is expected to be compromised soon. The number of respondents to our surveys increased over time, and it is thought that the number of respondents was dependent on their knowledge of the status of operational limitations. By using a series of surveys conducted through Twitter Polls, we were quickly able to determine the extent of the restrictions on surgery at medical facilities across the country about one month ahead of the survey by the JSA. By periodically soliciting responses to the same survey on Twitter, we were able to estimate the extent to which operations would be restricted nationally—over time. Our methodology in this study is an estimation method that uses mathematical analysis. We used public data from a database operated...
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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