Is COVID-19 mortality associated with test number?

Kentaro Iwata; Chisato Miyakoshi

doi:10.4103/jfmpc.jfmpc_1633_21!

Is COVID-19 mortality associated with test number?

J Family Med Prim Care. 2022 May;11(5):1842-1844. doi: 10.4103/jfmpc.jfmpc_1633_21!. Epub 2022 May 14.

Authors

Kentaro Iwata¹, Chisato Miyakoshi²

Affiliations

¹ Division of Infectious Diseases Therapeutics, Kobe University Graduate School of Medicine, Kobe, Japan.
² Department of Research Support, Center for Clinical Research and Innovation, Kobe City Medical Center General Hospital, Kobe, Japan.

Abstract

Introduction: With the ongoing pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), there is an argument on whether we should increase the number of testing for the coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) to mitigate the epidemic in a given country. Therefore, we investigated the correlation between testing number and mortality to evaluate the hypothesis.

Methods: Data on an open-access database of COVID-19 was retrieved. Member countries of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), BRICs nations (Brazil, Russia, India, and China), and Taiwan were included in the analysis, but 2 countries were removed as outliers.

Results: There was a weak, positive correlation between mortality and testing (r = 0.34, P = 0.03). On regression analysis, there was a positive slope but the coefficient was very small (0.00064).

Conclusions: We found a very small positive correlation between testing number and mortality for COVID-19.

Keywords: COVID-19; PCR-testing; mortality.