Abstract
SARS-CoV2 a new emerging Corona Virus Disease in humans, which called for containment measures by many countries. The current paper aims to discuss the impact of two different sampling methodologies when executing a drive through COVID-19 survey on the quality of estimated disease burden measures. Secondary data analysis of a pilot cross-sectional survey targeting Qatar's primary health care registered population was done. Two groups with different sampling methods were compared for estimating COVID-19 point prevalence using molecular testing for nasopharyngeal swabs. The first group is a stratified random sample non-proportional to size (N = 260). A total of 16 population strata based on age group, gender, and nationality were sampled. The second group is the Open invitation group (N = 841). The results showed that the two groups were obviously and significantly different in age and nationality. Besides, reporting of COVID-19 symptoms was more frequent in the open invitation group (28.2%) than the random sample (16.2%). The open invitation group overestimated the symptomatic COVID-19 prevalence rate by more than four times, while it overestimated the asymptomatic COVID-19 cases by a small margin. The overall prevalence rate of active COVID-19 cases in the open invitation sample (13.3%) was almost double that of the random sample (6.9%). Furthermore, using population sampling weights reduced the prevalence rate to 0.8%. The lesson learned here is that it is wise to consider the magnitude of bias introduced in a surveillance system when relying on convenient sampling approaches in response to time constraints.
Highlights
On 31st December 2019, Chinese national authorities reported an outbreak of pneumonia with unknown etiology [1]
The primary healthcare service in Qatar are delivered by the Primary Health Care Corporation (PHCC), which is the largest primary care provider in the country with 27 health centers distributed across three geographical regions – North, Central and South
The survey originally targeted a random sample of PHCC registered population (N = 1,063,243 as of May 2020 or ∼70% of the total population of Qatar) with only two working days assigned for data collection phase
Summary
On 31st December 2019, Chinese national authorities reported an outbreak of pneumonia with unknown etiology [1]. Coronaviruses in the recent past have come to attention as pathogens of emerging respiratory disease outbreaks such as, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) in 2002–3 and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) in 2012–14. The newly identified coronavirus with its epicenter in Wuhan was labeled Severe Acute Respiratory Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV2) and is known as 2019 novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) and coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-2019) [2]. SARS-CoV2 very quickly spread to other parts of China and the world. First imported cases were reported in Japan, Thailand and Republic of Korea between the 13–20th January [1]. With 18 countries affected and as the outbreak continued to spread globally, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared it a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) on the 30th January 2020 [4]. Controlling the disease is still a priority worldwide with more than 116 million cases and 2,700 thousand deaths recorded until the 7th of March 2021 [6]
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