Back

Cumulative COVID-19 incidence indicators should account for the population-at-risk dynamics

Masjuan, P.; Trias-Llimos, S.; Rojas, C.; Prakash, A.; Gullon, P.; Tobias, A.; Lopez-Gay, A.

2022-10-20 epidemiology
10.1101/2022.10.18.22281225 medRxiv
Show abstract

Risk estimators for COVID-19 propagation based on the incidence rate of new cases can be misleading as they usually fail to account for the fraction of population immunized by infection or vaccination.This misconception yields different incidence rates, as we illustrate using the daily number of COVID-19 reported cases in Spain during the pre-vaccine period, between 15/01/2020 and 11/07/2021. An increase in the incidence rate of about 7% is found when properly accounting for the population at risk. Our results demonstrate that accounting for dynamic changes to the immunized fraction of the population is necessary for accurate risk estimation. We hope that our findings can lead to more effective strategies for pandemic response.

Matching journals

The top 6 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.