Modrák et al., 2021

Disease progression of 213 patients hospitalized with COVID-19 in the Czech Republic in March-October 2020: An exploratory analysis

At a glance

Objective

To explore associations between COVID-19 treatments and patient outcomes.

Related articles

Currently none. This article may be related to other articles modeling disease trajectories over time.

DOI

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0245103

Background

• Lack of knowledge about effective treatments for COVID-19
• Existing methods for predicting COVID-19 severity are at high risk of bias

Methods

• Convenience sample from 10 sites
• Data were available on daily resolution
• Multiverse analysis, which reports and compare different models to capture uncertainty about different models and its impact on the conclusions
• Among the models run is a Bayesian HMM using rates, restricted transitions, and terminal states implemented in brms with some added special sauce (for more detail, see the GitHub repo and a post on the Stan discourse)

Results

• Mostly inconclusive results
• Adjusted models suggest that effect of some candidate treatments is spurious

Conclusion

• Other studies on the analyzed treatments likely overestimated their effectiveness