Evidence map›Paper›PMID 34583317›Full record

ArticleJMIR public health and surveillance2021

Predicting COVID-19 Transmission to Inform the Management of Mass Events: Model-Based Approach.

Claire Donnat, Freddy Bunbury, Jack Kreindler, David Liu, Filippos T Filippidis, Tonu Esko, Austen El-Osta, Matthew Harris

Abstract read
In one paragraph

Article in JMIR public health and surveillance, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.

0numbers the graph read from it
0cells of the map it votes in
6citing papers in PubMed, 1 pooled it
–field-weighted citation impact
1 · What the graph read from it

What it found

Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.

The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.

2 · The registry

The trial behind it

Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.

Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.

3 · Its place in the literature

Who cites it

6 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.

  1. Pooled it
  2. Review
  3. Article
  4. Article
  5. COVID-19 Pandemic Risk Assessment: Systematic Review.Risk management and healthcare policy · 2024
    Review
  6. Article
4 · The record

Corrections and comments

PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.

5 · Who and what money

Authors and funding

8 authors.

Claire DonnatDepartment of Statistics, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, United States.ORCID 0000-0001-7079-8060
Freddy BunburyDepartment of Plant Biology, Carnegie Institution for Science, Stanford, CA, United States.ORCID 0000-0002-2830-3674
Jack KreindlerFaculty of Medicine, School of Public Health, Imperial College, London, United Kingdom.ORCID 0000-0002-6133-3429
David LiuDepartment of Statistics, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, United States.ORCID 0000-0002-0043-228X
Filippos T FilippidisFaculty of Medicine, School of Public Health, Imperial College, London, United Kingdom.ORCID 0000-0002-2101-2559
Tonu EskoInstitute of Genomics, University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia.ORCID 0000-0003-1982-6569
Austen El-OstaFaculty of Medicine, School of Public Health, Imperial College, London, United Kingdom.ORCID 0000-0002-8772-4938
Matthew HarrisFaculty of Medicine, School of Public Health, Imperial College, London, United Kingdom.ORCID 0000-0002-0005-9710

Funding

No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.

6 · The paper itself

Abstract

backgroundModelling COVID-19 transmission at live events and public gatherings is essential to controlling the probability of subsequent outbreaks and communicating to participants their personalized risk. Yet, despite the fast-growing body of literature on COVID-19 transmission dynamics, current risk models either neglect contextual information including vaccination rates or disease prevalence or do not attempt to quantitatively model transmission.

objectiveThis paper attempted to bridge this gap by providing informative risk metrics for live public events, along with a measure of their uncertainty.

methodsBuilding upon existing models, our approach ties together 3 main components: (1) reliable modelling of the number of infectious cases at the time of the event, (2) evaluation of the efficiency of pre-event screening, and (3) modelling of the event's transmission dynamics and their uncertainty using Monte Carlo simulations.

resultsWe illustrated the application of our pipeline for a concert at the Royal Albert Hall and highlighted the risk's dependency on factors such as prevalence, mask wearing, and event duration. We demonstrate how this event held on 3 different dates (August 20, 2020; January 20, 2021; and March 20, 2021) would likely lead to transmission events that are similar to community transmission rates (0.06 vs 0.07, 2.38 vs 2.39, and 0.67 vs 0.60, respectively). However, differences between event and background transmissions substantially widened in the upper tails of the distribution of the number of infections (as denoted by their respective 99th quantiles: 1 vs 1, 19 vs 8, and 6 vs 3, respectively, for our 3 dates), further demonstrating that sole reliance on vaccination and antigen testing to gain entry would likely significantly underestimate the tail risk of the event.

conclusionsDespite the unknowns surrounding COVID-19 transmission, our estimation pipeline opens the discussion on contextualized risk assessment by combining the best tools at hand to assess the order of magnitude of the risk. Our model can be applied to any future event and is presented in a user-friendly RShiny interface. Finally, we discussed our model's limitations as well as avenues for model evaluation and improvement.

Indexed as

COVID-19Disease OutbreaksHumansSARS-CoV-2COVID-19live event managementMonte Carlo simulationtransmission dynamics

Identifiers

PMID34583317
PMCPMC8638785

What Socratic holds

Textmetadata
LicenceCC BY
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Registered trials

None linked

Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the Socratic graph.