COVID-19 Surveillance in the Primary Health Care Population of Qatar: Experience of Prioritizing Timeliness Over Representativeness When Sampling the Population

• Main Authors: Hamda Abdulla A/Qotba (Author), Ahmed Sameer Al Nuaimi (Author), Hanan Al Mujalli (Author), Abduljaleel Abdullatif Zainel (Author), Hanan Khudadad (Author), Tamara Marji (Author), Shajitha Thekke Veettil (Author), Mohamed Ahmed Syed (Author)
• Format: Book
• Published: Frontiers Media S.A., 2021-05-01T00:00:00Z.
• Subjects: article
• Online Access: Connect to this object online.

Summary

SARS-CoV2 a new emerging Corona Virus Disease in humans, which called for containment measures by many countries. The current paper aims to discuss the impact of two different sampling methodologies when executing a drive through COVID-19 survey on the quality of estimated disease burden measures. Secondary data analysis of a pilot cross-sectional survey targeting Qatar's primary health care registered population was done. Two groups with different sampling methods were compared for estimating COVID-19 point prevalence using molecular testing for nasopharyngeal swabs. The first group is a stratified random sample non-proportional to size (N = 260). A total of 16 population strata based on age group, gender, and nationality were sampled. The second group is the Open invitation group (N = 841). The results showed that the two groups were obviously and significantly different in age and nationality. Besides, reporting of COVID-19 symptoms was more frequent in the open invitation group (28.2%) than the random sample (16.2%). The open invitation group overestimated the symptomatic COVID-19 prevalence rate by more than four times, while it overestimated the asymptomatic COVID-19 cases by a small margin. The overall prevalence rate of active COVID-19 cases in the open invitation sample (13.3%) was almost double that of the random sample (6.9%). Furthermore, using population sampling weights reduced the prevalence rate to 0.8%. The lesson learned here is that it is wise to consider the magnitude of bias introduced in a surveillance system when relying on convenient sampling approaches in response to time constraints.

Item Description

2296-2565
10.3389/fpubh.2021.654734