Long Cheng, Fu Xin-Miao, Fu Zhi-Fu
Department of Orthopaedics, Sichuan University West China Hospital, Chengdu 610041, Sichuan Province, China.
College of Life Sciences, Fujian Normal University, Fuzhou 350117, Fujian Province, China.
World J Clin Cases. 2020 Oct 6;8(19):4431-4442. doi: 10.12998/wjcc.v8.i19.4431.
The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic is hitting many countries. It is hypothesized the epidemic is differentially progressing in different countries.
To investigate how the COVID-19 epidemic is going on in different countries by analyzing representative countries.
The status of COVID-19 epidemic in over 60 most affected countries was characterized. The data of daily new cases of each country were collected from Worldometer. The data of daily tests for the United States, Italy, and South Korea were collected from the Website of One World Data. Levels of daily positive COVID-19 tests in the two most affected states of the United States (New York and New Jersey) were collected from the website of the COVID Tracking Project. Statistics were analyzed using Microcal Origin software with ANOVA algorithm, and significance level was set at a value of 0.05.
The COVID-19 epidemic was differentially progressing in different countries. Comparative analyses of daily new cases as of April 19, 2020 revealed that 61 most affected countries can be classified into four types: Downward (22), upward (20), static-phase (12), and uncertain ones (7). In particular, the 12 static-phase countries including the United States were characterized by largely constant numbers of daily new cases in the past over 14 d. Furthermore, these static-phase countries were overall significantly lower in testing density ( = 0.016) but higher in the level of positive COVID-19 tests than downward countries ( = 0.028). These findings suggested that the testing capacity in static-phase countries was lagging behind the spread of the outbreak, ., daily new cases (confirmed) were likely less than daily new infections and the remaining undocumented infections were thus still expanding, resulting in unstoppable epidemic.
Increasing the testing capacity and/or reducing the COVID-19 transmission are urgently needed to stop the potentially unstoppable, severing crisis in static-phase countries.
2019年冠状病毒病（COVID-19）大流行正在冲击许多国家。据推测，该疫情在不同国家的发展情况有所不同。
通过分析具有代表性的国家来调查COVID-19疫情在不同国家的发展情况。
对60多个受影响最严重国家的COVID-19疫情状况进行了描述。各国每日新增病例数据从世界ometers网站收集。美国、意大利和韩国的每日检测数据从“同一个世界数据”网站收集。美国受影响最严重的两个州（纽约和新泽西）的每日COVID-19检测阳性率数据从COVID追踪项目网站收集。使用具有方差分析算法的Microcal Origin软件进行统计分析，显著性水平设定为0.05。
COVID-19疫情在不同国家的发展情况有所不同。对截至2020年4月19日的每日新增病例进行比较分析发现，61个受影响最严重的国家可分为四类：下降型（22个）、上升型（20个）、稳定型（12个）和不确定型（7个）。特别是，包括美国在内的12个稳定型国家的特点是，在过去14天多的时间里，每日新增病例数基本保持不变。此外，这些稳定型国家的总体检测密度显著低于下降型国家（P = 0.016），但COVID-19检测阳性率高于下降型国家（P = 0.028）。这些发现表明，稳定型国家的检测能力落后于疫情传播速度，即每日新增病例（确诊）可能少于每日新增感染病例，因此其余未记录的感染病例仍在增加，导致疫情无法遏制。
迫切需要提高检测能力和/或减少COVID-19传播，以阻止稳定型国家可能无法遏制的严重危机。
