Author:
Catalano Ralph,Casey Joan A.,Gemmill Alison,Bruckner Tim
Abstract
Abstract
Background
Debate over “social distancing” as a response to the pandemic includes the claim that disrupting clinical and public health programming dependent on human-to-human contact increased non-COVID-19 deaths. This claim warrants testing because novel pathogens will continue to emerge. Tests, however, appear frustrated by lack of a convention for estimating non-COVID-19 deaths that would have occurred had clinical and public health programming during the pre-vaccine pandemic remained as efficacious as in the pre-pandemic era. Intending to hasten the emergence of such a convention, we describe and demonstrate “new-signal, prior-response expectations” suggested by research and methods at the intersection of epidemiology and process control engineering.
Methods
Using German data, we estimate pre-pandemic public health efficacy by applying Box-Jenkins methods to 271 weekly counts of all-cause deaths from December 29 2014 through March 8 2020. We devise new-signal, prior-response expectations by applying the model to weekly non-COVID-19 deaths from March 9 2020 through December 26 2020.
Results
The COVID-19 pandemic did not coincide with more non-COVID-19 deaths than expected from the efficacy of responses to pre-pandemic all-cause deaths.
Conclusions
New-signal, prior-response estimates can contribute to evaluating the efficacy of public health programming in reducing non-COVID-19 deaths during the pre-vaccine pandemic.
Funder
National Institutes of Health
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Subject
Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health