Published in American Journal of Epidemiology
Longitudinal trajectories of vital signs and biomarkers during admission remain poorly characterized for COVID-19 patients despite their potential to provide critical insights about disease progression. We studied 1884 patients with SARS-CoV2 infection from 3/4/2020-6/25/2020 within one Maryland hospital system and used a retrospective longitudinal...
Published in American Journal of Epidemiology
Epidemiologists sometimes use external sources of variation to explore highly-confounded exposure-outcome relationships or exposures that cannot be randomized. These exogenous sources of variation, or natural experiments, are sometimes proposed as instrumental variables to examine the effects of a given exposure(s) on a given outcome(s). Previous e...
Published in American Journal of Epidemiology
We assessed the teratogenicity of tenofovir, a human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) drug similar to remdesivir currently being evaluated for the treatment of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). Using US Medicaid Analytic Extract (MAX) claims data (2000-2014), we identified a population-based pregnancy cohort of women with HIV who filled ≥1 prescript...
Published in American Journal of Epidemiology
We evaluate whether randomly sampling and testing a set number of individuals for coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) while adjusting for misclassification error captures the true prevalence. We also quantify the impact of misclassification error bias on publicly reported case data in Maryland. Using a stratified random sampling approach, 50,000 in...
Published in American Journal of Epidemiology
Estimates of the reproductive number for novel pathogens such as severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 are essential for understanding the potential trajectory of the epidemic and the level of intervention that is needed to bring the epidemic under control. However, most methods for estimating the basic reproductive number ( R 0) and time...
Published in American Journal of Epidemiology
Serological surveys can provide evidence of cases that were not previously detected, depict the spectrum of disease severity, and estimate the proportion of asymptomatic infections. To capture these parameters, survey sample sizes may need to be very large, especially when the overall infection rate is still low. Therefore, we propose the use of “s...
Published in American journal of epidemiology
In May 2020, the Journal published an opinion piece by a member of the Editorial Board, in which the author reviewed several papers and argued that using hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) + azithromycin (AZ) early to treat symptomatic coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) cases in high-risk patients should be broadly applied. As members of the Journal's Edito...
Published in American journal of epidemiology
The elimination of cervical cancer rests on high efficacy of human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccines. The HPV type distribution among cases of invasive cervical cancer (ICC) is used to make predictions about the impact of eliminating different types of HPV, but accumulating evidence of differences in age-specific cancer incidence by HPV type exists. We...
Published in American journal of epidemiology
The spread of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is causing an unprecedented crisis around the world, with South Korea being no exception. South Korea experienced a surge of COVID-19 cases on February 19, 2020, but was able to flatten the COVID-19 curve in only 20 days without enforcing lockdown measures that restrict the freedom and movement of p...
Published in American Journal of Epidemiology
The objective was to estimate the diagnostic accuracy of real time polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) and lateral flow immunoassay (LFIA) tests for COVID-19, depending on the time post symptom onset. Based on the cross-classified results of RT-PCR and LFIA, we used Bayesian latent class models (BLCMs), which do not require a gold standard for the e...
