Guccio Calogero
Department of Economics and Business, University of Catania, Catania, Italy.
Health Econometrics and Data Group, University of York, Heslington, United Kingdom.
Public Health Rev. 2022 Jun 20;43:1604308. doi: 10.3389/phrs.2022.1604308. eCollection 2022.
This Policy Brief aims to contribute to the debate on the resilience of the healthcare systems during the pandemic by discussing whether mortality indicators are appropriate for assessing resilience or whether other statistics should be employed. During the first wave of the COVID-19, much emphasis was placed on case-fatality rates to offer a preliminary assessment of the resilience of healthcare systems. However, these statistics are often biased and do not consider the real figure of the population that has been infected. Comparing data obtained with different approaches based on statistical inference and large-scale serological survey, the brief highlights, that great care must be taken when using case-fatality data, which in the absence of careful analysis, can lead to erroneous conclusions. Using case-fatality rate gives us no sounding information about the real capability of healthcare systems to save lives during the pandemic. However, even in the absence of detailed epidemiological data new advancements in statistical methods can be useful to provide a more sounding evaluation of the resilience of the healthcare systems.
本政策简报旨在通过讨论死亡率指标是否适合评估韧性，或者是否应采用其他统计数据，为关于疫情期间医疗系统韧性的辩论做出贡献。在新冠疫情第一波期间，人们非常重视病死率，以对医疗系统的韧性进行初步评估。然而，这些统计数据往往存在偏差，没有考虑到实际感染人群的数量。通过比较基于统计推断和大规模血清学调查的不同方法获得的数据，简报强调，在使用病死率数据时必须格外谨慎，因为在没有仔细分析的情况下，可能会得出错误的结论。使用病死率并不能让我们了解医疗系统在疫情期间拯救生命的实际能力。然而，即使没有详细的流行病学数据，统计方法的新进展也有助于对医疗系统的韧性进行更合理的评估。
