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Legislative incapacity and underreporting of COVID-19 mortality.

ABSTRACT: The prevalent interpretation of COVID-19 mortality underreporting typically focuses on authoritarian regimes' propensity for data manipulation. This study, however, posits that the demand side is integral to enhancing the veracity of COVID-19 mortality figures. Through quantitative analysis, it is demonstrated that legislative oversight of the executive significantly correlates with the divergence between excess mortality and officially reported COVID-19 mortality. Moreover, such oversight is shown to bolster the influence of bureaucratic capacity on the precision of mortality data. Consequently, these findings suggest that the notion of "autocratic advantage" in COVID-19 management is not solely a byproduct of regime-led data falsification but also a reflection of deficiencies in legislative and bureaucratic capacities.

SUBMITTER: Saito T

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10982546 | biostudies-literature | 2024 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Legislative incapacity and underreporting of COVID-19 mortality.

Saito Takaharu T

Preventive medicine reports 20240320

The prevalent interpretation of COVID-19 mortality underreporting typically focuses on authoritarian regimes' propensity for data manipulation. This study, however, posits that the demand side is integral to enhancing the veracity of COVID-19 mortality figures. Through quantitative analysis, it is demonstrated that legislative oversight of the executive significantly correlates with the divergence between excess mortality and officially reported COVID-19 mortality. Moreover, such oversight is sh ...[more]

PMID: 38562433

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Project description:BackgroundUnderreporting cases of infectious diseases poses a major challenge in the analysis of their epidemiological characteristics and dynamical aspects. Without accurate numerical estimates it is difficult to precisely quantify the proportions of severe and critical cases, as well as the mortality rate. Such estimates can be provided for instance by testing the presence of the virus. However, during an ongoing epidemic, such tests' implementation is a daunting task. This work addresses this issue by presenting a methodology to estimate underreported infections based on approximations of the stable rates of hospitalization and death.MethodsWe present a novel methodology for the stable rate estimation of hospitalization and death related to the Corona Virus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) using publicly available reports from various distinct communities. These rates are then used to estimate underreported infections on the corresponding areas by making use of reported daily hospitalizations and deaths. The impact of underreporting infections on vaccination strategies is estimated under different disease-transmission scenarios using a Susceptible-Exposed-Infective-Removed-like (SEIR) epidemiological model.ResultsFor the considered locations, during the period of study, the estimations suggest that the number of infected individuals could reach 30% of the population of these places, representing, in some cases, more than six times the observed numbers. These results are in close agreement with estimates from independent seroprevalence studies, thus providing a strong validation of the proposed methodology. Moreover, the presence of large numbers of underreported infections can reduce the perceived impact of vaccination strategies in reducing rates of mortality and hospitalization.ConclusionspBy using the proposed methodology and employing a judiciously chosen data analysis implementation, we estimate COVID-19 underreporting from publicly available data. This leads to a powerful way of quantifying underreporting impact on the efficacy of vaccination strategies. As a byproduct, we evaluate the impact of underreporting in the designing of vaccination strategies.

Project description:The epidemic of COVID-19 has shown different developments in Africa compared to the other continents. Three different approaches were used in this study to analyze this situation. In the first part, basic statistics were performed to estimate the contribution of the elderly people to the total numbers of cases and deaths in comparison to the other continents; Similarly, the health systems capacities were analysed to assess the level of underreporting. In the second part, differential equations were reconstructed from the epidemiological time series of cases and deaths (from the John Hopkins University) to analyse the dynamics of COVID-19 in seventeen countries. In the third part, the time evolution of the contact number was reconstructed since the beginning of the outbreak to investigate the effectiveness of the mitigation strategies. Results were compared to the Oxford stringency index and to the mobility indices of the Google Community Mobility Reports. Compared to Europe, the analyses show that the lower proportion of elderly people in Africa enables to explain the lower total numbers of cases and deaths by a factor of 5.1 on average (from 1.9 to 7.8). It corresponds to a genuine effect. Nevertheless, COVID-19 numbers are effectively largely underestimated in Africa by a factor of 8.5 on average (from 1.7 to 20. and more) due to the weakness of the health systems at country level. Geographically, the models obtained for the dynamics of cases and deaths reveal very diversified dynamics. The dynamics is chaotic in many contexts, including a situation of bistability rarely observed in dynamical systems. Finally, the contact number directly deduced from the epidemiological observations reveals an effective role of the mitigation strategies on the short term. On the long term, control measures have contributed to maintain the epidemic at a low level although the progressive release of the stringency did not produce a clear increase of the contact number. The arrival of the omicron variant is clearly detected and characterised by a quick increase of interpeople contact, for most of the African countries considered in the analysis.

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Legislative incapacity and underreporting of COVID-19 mortality.

Publications

Legislative incapacity and underreporting of COVID-19 mortality.

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