Performance of the Colombian surveillance system during the COVID-19 pandemic: A rapid evaluation of the first 50 days
Abstract
Introduction: The COVID pandemic is a challenge for public health surveillance and an opportunity to assess its strengths and weaknesses to improve the response.
Objective: To evaluate the performance of the Colombian public health surveillance system during the first 50 days of the COVID-19 pandemic in the country.
Materials and methods: We analyzed the data published between March 6 and April 24, 2020, by the Instituto Nacional de Salud and the World Health Organization (WHO).
We evaluated: i) the quality of the data according to the fulfillment of Benford’s law, and ii) the timeliness of the information measured as the difference in dates between the data generated by the Instituto Nacional de Salud and WHO’s situational reports. We assessed the fulfillment of Benford’s law using the p values of the log-likelihood ratio, the chi square or Moreno’s exact tests.
Results: Until April 24 there were 4,881 cases of COVID-19 in Colombia. During most of the first 50 days of the pandemic, Benford’s law was fulfilled except the first days of the epidemic. The difference between Instituto Nacional de Salud and WHO reports largely depends on the different reporting times.
Conclusion: In general, the Colombian public health surveillance system fulfilled Benford’s law suggesting that there was quality in the data. Future studies comparing the performance of the departments and districts will improve the diagnosis of the Colombian surveillance system.
Downloads
References
Declich S, Carter AO. Public health surveillance: Historical origins, methods and evaluation. Bull World Health Organ. 1994;72:285-304.
Aldis W. Health security as a public health concept: a critical analysis. Health Pol Plan. 2008;23:369-75. https://doi.org/10.1093/heapol/czn030
Weir L, Mykhalovskiy E. The geopolitics of global public health surveillance in the twenty-first century. In: Bashford A, editors. Medicine at the border. London: Palgrave Macmillan; 2007. p. 240-63.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Guidelines for evaluating surveillance systems. MMWR Suppl. 1988;37:1-18.
Bedford J, Enria D, Giesecke J, Heymann DL, Ihekweazu C, Kobinger G, et al. COVID-19: Towards controlling of a pandemic. Lancet. 2020;395:1015-8. http://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(20)30673-5
Pung R, Chiew CJ, Young BE, Chin S, Chen MIC, Clapham HE, et al. Investigation of three clusters of COVID-19 in Singapore: Implications for surveillance and response measures. Lancet. 2020;395:1039-46. http://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(20)30528-6
Idrovo AJ, Eslava JC, Ruiz-Rodríguez M, Rodríguez JM. La otra transición epidemiológica: hitos en el desarrollo de la epidemiología de los factores de riesgo en Colombia. Biomédica. 2008;28:480-96. https://doi.org/10.7705/biomedica.v28i4.54
Dáguer CF, Hernández-Tasco A. Héroes de a pie: voces y memorias de los detectives de la salud y la epidemiología de campo en Colombia. Bogotá: Instituto Nacional de Salud; 2019.
Idrovo AJ, Fernández-Niño JA, Bojórquez-Chapela I, Ruiz-Rodríguez M, Agudelo CA, Pacheco O, et al. Percepción de competencias en epidemiología en México y Colombia durante la epidemia de influenza A(H1N1) entre estudiantes de salud pública. Rev Panam Salud Pública. 2011;30:361-9.
Idrovo AJ, Fernández-Niño JA, Bojórquez-Chapela I, Moreno-Montoya J. Performance of public health surveillance systems during the influenza A(H1N1) pandemic in the Americas: Testing a new method based on Benford’s law. Epidemiol Infect. 2011;139:1827-34. http://doi.org/10.1017/S095026881100015X
Benford F. The law of anomalous numbers. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society. 1938;78:551-72.
Hill TP. The first digit phenomenon. American Scientist. 1998;86:358-63.
Formann AK. The Newcomb-Benford law in its relation to some common distributions. PLoS One. 2010;5:e10541. http://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0010541
Durtschi C, Hillison W, Pacini C. The effective use of Benford’s law to assist in detecting fraud in accounting data. J Forensic Account. 2004;5:17-34.
Lacasa L. Newcomb-Benford law helps customs officers to detect fraud in international trade. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA. 2019;116:11-3. http://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1819470116
Gómez-Camponovo M, Moreno J, Idrovo ÁJ, Páez M, Achkar M. Monitoring the Paraguayan epidemiological dengue surveillance system (2009-2011) using Benford’s law. Biomédica. 2016;36:583-92. http://doi.org/10.7705/biomedica.v36i4.2731
Manrique-Hernández EF, Fernández-Niño JA, Idrovo AJ. Global performance of epidemiologic surveillance of Zika virus: Rapid assessment of an ongoing epidemic. Public Health. 2017;143:14-6. http://doi.org/10.1007/s10900-016-0177-7
Idrovo AJ, Manrique-Hernández EF. Data quality of Chinese surveillance of COVID-19: Objective analysis based on WHO´s situation reports. Asia Pac J Public Health. 2020. http://doi.org/10.1177/1010539520927265
Moreno-Montoya J. Benford's law with small sample sizes: A new exact test useful in health sciences during epidemics. Rev Salud UIS. 2020;52:153-5. https://doi.org/10.18273/revsal.v52n2-2020010
Kuiper NH. Tests concerning random points on a circle. Proceedings Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen (Series A). 1962;63:38-47.
Gardy JL, Loman NJ. Towards a genomics-informed, real-time, global pathogen surveillance system. Nat Rev Genet. 2018;19:9-20. http://doi.org/10.1038/nrg.2017.88
Pacheco O, Beltrán M, Nelson CA, Valencia D, Tolosa N, Farr SL, et al. Zika virus disease in Colombia - Preliminary Report. N Engl J Med. 2016. http://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMoa1604037
Dong E, Du H, Gardner L. An interactive web-based dashboard to track COVID-19 in realtime. Lancet Infect Dis. 2020. http://doi.org/10.1016/S1473-3099(20)30120
German RR, Lee LM, Horan JM, Milstein RL, Pertowski CA, Waller MN, et al. Updated guidelines for evaluating public health surveillance systems: Recommendations from the Guidelines Working Group. MMWR. 2001;50:1-35.
Some similar items:
- Alexandra Hurtado-Ortiz, José Moreno-Montoya , Franklyn E. Prieto-Alvarado , Álvaro J. Idrovo, Benchmarking of public health surveillance of COVID-19 in Colombia: First semester , Biomedica: Vol. 40 No. Supl. 2 (2020): SARS-CoV-2 y COVID-19
- Jose William Martínez, Juan Camilo Martínez , Diego Alejandro Rincón, Diego Alejandro Salazar, Juan Daniel Castrillón, María del Pilar Gómez, Oscar Felipe Suárez , Juan Pablo Vélez, Ángela María Valencia, Sandra Gómez, Ángel María Rincón , Álvaro J. Idrovo, José Moreno-Montoya, Franklyn E. Prieto-Alvarado, Alexandra Hurtado-Ortiz, Benchmarking of public health surveillance of COVID-19 in Colombia: First semester , Biomedica: Vol. 40 No. Supl. 2 (2020): SARS-CoV-2 y COVID-19
- Zulma M. Cucunubá, Latin American scientific research prorities for COVID-19 prevention and control , Biomedica: Vol. 40 No. Supl. 2 (2020): SARS-CoV-2 y COVID-19
- Julián Alfredo Fernández-Niño , Andrés Cubillos-Novella, Ietza Bojórquez , Michael Rodríguez , Recommendations for the response against COVID-19 in migratory contexts under a closed border: The case of Colombia , Biomedica: Vol. 40 No. Supl. 2 (2020): SARS-CoV-2 y COVID-19
- Nancy Yaneth Flórez , Stefany Alejandra Arévalo , Edna Catering Rodríguez , Jaime Guerrero , Kelly Paola Valverde , Paula Lucía Díaz , Lucy Angeline Montaño, Doris Mabel Gartner , Carolina Duarte , Jaime Enrique Moreno, An outbreak of Salmonella enterica subsp. enterica serovar Give associated with foodborne illness in the department of Vichada, Colombia, 2015 , Biomedica: Vol. 41 No. 1 (2021)
- Álvaro J. Idrovo, José Moreno-Montoya , Carlos E. Pinzón-Flórez , Performance of rapid IgM-IgG combined antibody tests in the occupational surveillance of COVID-19 in Colombian enterprises , Biomedica: Vol. 40 No. Supl. 2 (2020): SARS-CoV-2 y COVID-19
- Luis Mauricio Figueroa, Telehealth in Colombia, challenges associated with COVID-19 , Biomedica: Vol. 40 No. Supl. 2 (2020): SARS-CoV-2 y COVID-19
- Juan Pablo Orozco-Hernández , Juan José Montoya-Martínez, Manuel Conrado Pacheco-Gallego, Mauricio Céspedes-Roncancio , Gloria Liliana Porras-Hurtado, SARS-CoV-2 and rhinovirus/enterovirus co-infection in a critically ill young adult patient in Colombia , Biomedica: Vol. 40 No. Supl. 2 (2020): SARS-CoV-2 y COVID-19
- Jorge Alberto Cortés, Pilar Espitia, Yuliet Liliana Rosero-Lasso, Citywide preparedness for a pandemic: A crosssectional survey of knowledge, attitudes, and practices about respiratory infection prevention in Bogotá, Colombia , Biomedica: Vol. 40 No. Supl. 2 (2020): SARS-CoV-2 y COVID-19
- Luis Alberto Gómez, Editorial note about SARS-CoV-2 in the pandemic era , Biomedica: Vol. 40 No. Supl. 2 (2020): SARS-CoV-2 y COVID-19
| Article metrics | |
|---|---|
| Abstract views | |
| Galley vies | |
| PDF Views | |
| HTML views | |
| Other views | |
