Procedimentos Para Estimativa Da Velocidade De Disseminação De Doenças – Um Estudo De Caso Com Dados Da Covid-19 No Estado Do Paraná

Characterizing and quantifying the speed at which a disease spreads in a region is crucial for understanding and comparing the dissemination process in different locations and time intervals. During the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers from Brazil and around the world made efforts to understand and characterize the dynamics of infection and the spread of the disease. The present study aims to analyze different methods of characterizing the speed of new case emergence and COVID-19 spread in the state of Paraná. The research used data from 205,328 cases (RT-PCR tests) in 396 municipalities over a 244-day pandemic period for calculating the moving average, its value compared to what was observed 14 days earlier (bias), and five different calculation procedures based on the slope of the line characterizing the cumulative frequency of new cases per thousand inhabitants (beta value, slope/tangent of the analyzed period, maximum observed slope value in quintile and quartile intervals, and the sum of observed daily slope values). The research identified that in Paraná, the municipality with the highest COVID-19 spread rate was Itambé, and 37 locations can be characterized as having an outbreak during the analyzed period. Furthermore, it found that the beta values and the slope/tangent of the analyzed period can be used to characterize the disease's spread rate at the municipal level, and values exceeding 0.15 and 0.3 can be used as indicators of outbreaks for longer time intervals and for the epidemiological week, respectively

Art · Geography · Humanities · Medicine · Public Health in Brazil · Internal Medicine