As readers of The Lancet Regional Health – Western Pacific, along with the fact that
measles outbreaks have been warned of perfect storm of conditions for within 2022
by UNICEF and WHO, we pay a significant interest to the content of the paper entitled
“Measles outbreak in the Philippines: Epidemiological and clinical characteristics
of hospitalized children, 2016–2019” published earlier within the same journal.1,2
However, upon reproducing the results, we suspect that the authors has made several
computational errors.
In a prospective cohort study including more than 360,000 people in Hong Kong, Dr. Andrea Luk and colleagues explore age-specific risk factors for all-cause and cause-specific mortality in type 2 diabetes.
Australia commenced its COVID-19 vaccine program for children aged 12–15 years from
July 2021 and for children aged 5–11 years from January 2022 with two primary doses
of either Comirnaty (Pfizer–BioNTech BNT162b2, 10 μg for 5–11 years and 30 μg for
12–15 years) or Spikevax (Moderna mRNA-1273, 50 μg for 6–11 years and 100 μg for 12–15
years), 8 weeks apart. A booster dose is recommended for those aged 5–15 years with
complex health conditions or severe immunocompromise.
The Omicron variant of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) spreads rapidly and insidiously. Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) screening is an important means of blocking community transmission in China, but the costs associated with testing are high. Quarantine capacity and medical resources are also threatened. Therefore, we aimed to evaluate different screening strategies to balance outbreak control and consumption of resources. A community network of 2000 people, considering the heterogeneities of household size and age structure, was generated to reflect real contact networks, and a stochastic individual-based dynamic model was used to simulate SARS-CoV-2 transmission and assess different whole-area nucleic acid screening strategies. We designed a total of 87 screening strategies with different sampling methods, frequencies of screening, and timings of screening. The performance of these strategies was comprehensively evaluated by comparing the cumulative