Assessing the regional impact of Japan's COVID-19 state of emergency declaration: a population-level observational study using social networking services.
BMJ Open
; 11(2): e042002, 2021 02 15.
Article
in English
| MEDLINE | ID: covidwho-1085262
ABSTRACT
OBJECTIVE:
On 7 April 2020, the Japanese government declared a state of emergency in response to the novel coronavirus outbreak. To estimate the impact of the declaration on regional cities with low numbers of COVID-19 cases, large-scale surveillance to capture the current epidemiological situation of COVID-19 was urgently conducted in this study.DESIGN:
Cohort study.SETTING:
Social networking service (SNS)-based online survey conducted in five prefectures of Japan Tottori, Kagawa, Shimane, Tokushima and Okayama.PARTICIPANTS:
127 121 participants from the five prefectures surveyed between 24 March and 5 May 2020.INTERVENTIONS:
An SNS-based healthcare system named COOPERA (COvid-19 Operation for Personalized Empowerment to Render smart prevention And care seeking) was launched. It asks questions regarding postcode, personal information, preventive actions, and current and past symptoms related to COVID-19. PRIMARY AND SECONDARY OUTCOMEMEASURES:
Empirical Bayes estimates of age-sex-standardised incidence rate (EBSIR) of symptoms and the spatial correlation between the number of those who reported having symptoms and the number of COVID-19 cases were examined to identify the geographical distribution of symptoms in the five prefectures.RESULTS:
97.8% of participants had no subjective symptoms. We identified several geographical clusters of fever with significant spatial correlation (r=0.67) with the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases, especially in the urban centres of prefectural capital cities.CONCLUSIONS:
Given that there are still several high-risk areas measured by EBSIR, careful discussion on which areas should be reopened at the end of the state of emergency is urgently required using real-time SNS system to monitor the nationwide epidemic.Keywords
Full text:
Available
Collection:
International databases
Database:
MEDLINE
Main subject:
Social Networking
/
COVID-19
Type of study:
Cohort study
/
Experimental Studies
/
Observational study
/
Prognostic study
Limits:
Adolescent
/
Adult
/
Aged
/
Female
/
Humans
/
Male
/
Middle aged
/
Young adult
Country/Region as subject:
Asia
Language:
English
Journal:
BMJ Open
Year:
2021
Document Type:
Article
Affiliation country:
Bmjopen-2020-042002
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