Age-and sex-adjustment and the COVID-19 pandemic - transformative example from Italy

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic is causing hundreds of thousands of deaths worldwide. Monitoring the pandemic to compare countries and regions is of paramount importance to understand the infection dynamics and to prepare health care systems to face its consequences. To date, it has been impossible to compare data coming from different countries and regions partly because of a failure to apply basic epidemiological principles (e.g. adjustment for age), with emphasis on the numbers of cases. Interpreting numbers of cases (and the rates derived from them, e.g. case-fatality ratio) is problematic given that these are heavily dependent on variable policies about testing for COVID-19 at population level, leading to potential underreporting, especially of people showing few or no symptoms. Mortality, on the other hand, does not suffer from difference in testing and case finding; however it is potentially subject to misclassification too, whenever its definition differs from that recommended by WHO: deaths for which the immediate or underlying cause of death can be reasonably ascribed to COVID-19. China first reported that mortality from COVID19 is strongly associated with age and steeply increases with age, with higher rates in males than females. Therefore, not adjusting for age and sex undermines meaningful comparison between populations, especially when the age structure of populations differs markedly, such as for comparisons between low- and middle-income countries with high-income countries.

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© The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the International Epidemiological Association. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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DOI

https://doi.org/10.1093/ije/dyaa139

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https://www.research.ed.ac.uk/portal/en/publications/ageand-sexadjustment-and-the-covid19-pandemic--transformative-example-from-italy(9d159dbd-f6b7-4035-a957-c37e43b15528).html