A Non-Linear Biostatistical Graphical Modeling of Preventive Actions and Healthcare Factors in Controlling COVID-19 Pandemic

23, April 2021 |

Authors:

Abstract

Background: With the insurgence of the COVID-19 pandemic, many people died in the past several months, and the situation is ongoing with increasing health, social, and economic panic and vulnerability. As most of the countries relying on different preventive actions to control the outcomes of COVID-19, it is necessary to boost the knowledge about the effectiveness of such actions so that the policymakers take their country-based appropriate actions. This study generates evidence of taking the most impactful actions to combat COVID-19. Objective: In order to generate community-based scientific evidence, this study analyzed the outcome of COVID-19 in response to different control measures, healthcare facilities, life expectancy, and prevalent diseases. Methods: It used more than a hundred countries’ data collected from different databases. We performed a comparative graphical analysis with non-linear correlation estimation using R. Results: The reduction of COVID-19 cases is strongly correlated with the earliness of preventive initiation. The apathy of taking nationwide immediate precaution measures has been identified as one of the critical reasons to make the circumstances worse. There is significant non-linear relationship between COVID- 19 case fatality and number of physicians (NCC = 0.22; p-value ≤ 0.001), nurses and midwives (NCC = 0.17; p-value ≤ 0.001), hospital beds (NCC = 0.20; p-value ≤ 0.001), life expectancy of both sexes (NCC = 0.22; p-value ≤ 0.001), life expectancy of female (NCC = 0.27; p-value ≤ 0.001), and life expectancy of male (NCC = 0.19; p-value ≤ 0.001). COVID-19 deaths were found to be reduced with increased medical personnel and hospital beds. Interestingly, no association between the comorbidities and severity of COVID-19 was found excluding asthma, cancer, Alzheimer’s, and smoking. Conclusions: Enhancing healthcare facilities and early imposing the control measures could be valuable to prevent the COVID-19 pandemic. No association between COVID-19 and other comorbidities warranted further investigation at the pathobiological level.