A sequential test for assessing the effectiveness of response strategies during an emerging epidemic

Lam, Kwok Fai; Qu, Yuanke

doi:10.1002/bimj.202100293

Cited by 1 publication

(1 citation statement)

References 19 publications

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“…Indeed, it has been suggested that mild and long-term lockdown strategies had limited power and lowered efficiency in containing the disease in general as compared to strict and short-term lockdown 35 . Especially when infections overwhelm the healthcare system, the fatality rate can be surprisingly high due to inadequate medical resources 36 , 37 . The rtaCFR then declined gradually since January 2021 with a small peak of around 0.02 observed during the third wave in June 2021 dominated by the Delta variant.…”

Section: Simulation Studiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

A novel method to monitor COVID-19 fatality rate in real-time, a key metric to guide public health policy

Lee

Lam

2022

Sci Rep

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An accurate estimator of the real-time fatality rate is warranted to monitor the progress of ongoing epidemics, hence facilitating the policy-making process. However, most of the existing estimators fail to capture the time-varying nature of the fatality rate and are often biased in practice. A simple real-time fatality rate estimator with adjustment for reporting delays is proposed in this paper using the fused lasso technique. This approach is easy to use and can be broadly applied to public health practice as only basic epidemiological data are required. A large-scale simulation study suggests that the proposed estimator is a reliable benchmark for formulating public health policies during an epidemic with high accuracy and sensitivity in capturing the changes in the fatality rate over time, while the other two commonly-used case fatality rate estimators may convey delayed or even misleading signals of the true situation. The application to the COVID-19 data in Germany between January 2020 and January 2022 demonstrates the importance of the social restrictions in the early phase of the pandemic when vaccines were not available, and the beneficial effects of vaccination in suppressing the fatality rate to a low level since August 2021 irrespective of the rebound in infections driven by the more infectious Delta and Omicron variants during the fourth wave.

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Section: Simulation Studiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

A novel method to monitor COVID-19 fatality rate in real-time, a key metric to guide public health policy

Lee

Lam

2022

Sci Rep

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

A sequential test for assessing the effectiveness of response strategies during an emerging epidemic

Abstract: This article has earned an open data badge "Reproducible Research" for making publicly available the code necessary to reproduce the reported results. The results reported in this article could fully be reproduced.

Cited by 1 publication

References 19 publications

A novel method to monitor COVID-19 fatality rate in real-time, a key metric to guide public health policy

A novel method to monitor COVID-19 fatality rate in real-time, a key metric to guide public health policy

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