Assessing the regional impact of Japan's COVID-19 state of emergency declaration : a population-level observational study using social networking services

© Author(s) (or their employer(s)) 2021. Re-use permitted under CC BY-NC. No commercial re-use. See rights and permissions. Published by BMJ..

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 OUTCOME MEASURES: 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.

Medienart:

E-Artikel

Erscheinungsjahr:

2021

Erschienen:

2021

Enthalten in:

Zur Gesamtaufnahme - volume:11

Enthalten in:

BMJ open - 11(2021), 2 vom: 15. Feb., Seite e042002

Sprache:

Englisch

Beteiligte Personen:

Yoneoka, Daisuke [VerfasserIn]
Shi, Shoi [VerfasserIn]
Nomura, Shuhei [VerfasserIn]
Tanoue, Yuta [VerfasserIn]
Kawashima, Takayuki [VerfasserIn]
Eguchi, Akifumi [VerfasserIn]
Matsuura, Kentaro [VerfasserIn]
Makiyama, Koji [VerfasserIn]
Uryu, Shinya [VerfasserIn]
Ejima, Keisuke [VerfasserIn]
Sakamoto, Haruka [VerfasserIn]
Taniguchi, Toshibumi [VerfasserIn]
Kunishima, Hiroyuki [VerfasserIn]
Gilmour, Stuart [VerfasserIn]
Nishiura, Hiroshi [VerfasserIn]
Miyata, Hiroaki [VerfasserIn]

Links:

Volltext

Themen:

COVID-19
Epidemiology
Health policy
Infectious diseases
Journal Article
Observational Study
Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

Anmerkungen:

Date Completed 25.02.2021

Date Revised 25.02.2021

published: Electronic

Citation Status MEDLINE

doi:

10.1136/bmjopen-2020-042002

funding:

Förderinstitution / Projekttitel:

PPN (Katalog-ID):

NLM321488555