Stay-at-home policy: is it a case of exception fallacy? An internet-based ecological study
Abstract
Background
Countries with strict lockdown had a spike on the number of deaths. A recent mathematical model has suggested that staying at home did not play a dominant role in reducing COVID-19 transmission. Comparison between number of deaths and social mobility is difficult due to the non-stationary nature of the COVID-19 data.
Objective
To propose a novel approach to assess the association between staying at home values and the reduction/increase in the number of deaths due to COVID-19 in several regions around the world.
Methods
In this ecological study, data from <ext-link xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" ext-link-type="uri" xlink:href="http://www.google.com/covid19/mobility/">www.google.com/covid19/mobility/</ext-link> , ourworldindata.org and covid.saude.gov.br were combined. Countries with >100 deaths and with a Healthcare Access and Quality Index of ≥67 were included. Data were preprocessed and analyzed using the difference between number of deaths/million between 2 regions and the difference between the percentage of staying at home. Analysis was performed using linear regression and residual analysis
Results
After preprocessing the data, 87 regions around the world were included, yielding 3,741 pairwise comparisons for linear regression analysis. Only 63 (1.6%) comparisons were significant.
Discussion
With our results, we were not able to explain if COVID-19 mortality is reduced by staying as home in ∼98% of the comparisons after epidemiological weeks 9 to 34.
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