Evaluating cross-country variability on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on tuberculosis (TB) may provide urgent inputs to control programs as countries recover from the pandemic. We compared expected TB notifications, modeled using trends in annual TB notifications from 2013-2019, with observed TB notifications to compute the observed to expected (OE) ratios for 170 countries. We applied the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) method to identify the covariates, out of 27 pandemic- and tuberculosis-relevant variables, that had the strongest explanatory power for log OE ratios.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: The USA struggled in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic, but not all states struggled equally. Identifying the factors associated with cross-state variation in infection and mortality rates could help to improve responses to this and future pandemics. We sought to answer five key policy-relevant questions regarding the following: 1) what roles social, economic, and racial inequities had in interstate variation in COVID-19 outcomes; 2) whether states with greater health-care and public health capacity had better outcomes; 3) how politics influenced the results; 4) whether states that imposed more policy mandates and sustained them longer had better outcomes; and 5) whether there were trade-offs between a state having fewer cumulative SARS-CoV-2 infections and total COVID-19 deaths and its economic and educational outcomes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIndividuals frequently differ consistently from one another in their average behaviours (i.e. 'animal personality') and in correlated suites of consistent behavioural responses (i.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe contribution of genetic variation to phenotypes is a central factor in whether and how populations respond to selection. The most common approach to estimating these influences is via the calculation of heritabilities, which summarize the contribution of genetic variation to phenotypic variation. Heritabilities also indicate the relative effect of genetic variation on phenotypes versus that of environmental sources of variation.
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