Trends in treatment-seeking for fever in children under five years old in 151 countries from 1990 to 2020

Access to medical treatment for fever is essential to prevent morbidity and mortality in individuals and to prevent transmission of communicable febrile illness in communities. Quantification of the rates at which treatment is accessed is critical for health system planning and a prerequisite for disease burden estimates. In this study, national data on the proportion of children under five years old with fever who were taken for medical treatment were collected from all available countries in Africa, Latin America, and Asia (n = 91). We used generalised additive mixed models to estimate 30-year trends in the treatment-seeking rates across the majority of countries in these regions (n = 151). Our results show that the proportions of febrile children brought for medical treatment increased steadily over the last 30 years, with the greatest increases occurring in areas where rates had originally been lowest, which includes Latin America and Caribbean, North Africa and the Middle East (51 and 50% increase, respectively), and Sub-Saharan Africa (23% increase). Overall, the aggregated and population-weighted estimate of children with fever taken for treatment at any type of facility rose from 61% (59-64 95% CI) in 1990 to 71% (69-72 95% CI) in 2020. The overall population-weighted average for fraction of treatment in the public sector was largely unchanged during the study period: 49% (42-58 95% CI) sought care at public facilities in 1990 and 47% (44-52 95% CI) in 2020. Overall, the findings indicate that improvements in access to care have been made where they were most needed, but that despite rapid initial gains, progress can plateau without substantial investment. In 2020 there remained significant gaps in care utilisation that must be factored in when developing control strategies and deriving disease burden estimates.

Impacts on Human Movement in Australian Cities Related to the COVID-19 Pandemic

No studies have yet examined high-resolution shifts in the spatial patterns of human movement in Australia throughout 2020 and 2021, a period coincident with the repeated enactment and removal of varied governmental restrictions aimed at reducing community transmission of SARS-CoV-2. We compared overlapping timeseries of COVID-19 pandemic-related restrictions, epidemiological data on cases and vaccination rates, and high-resolution human movement data to characterize population-level responses to the pandemic in Australian cities. We found that restrictions on human movement and/or mandatory business closures reduced the average population-level weekly movement volumes in cities, as measured by aggregated travel time, by almost half. Of the movements that continued to occur, long movements reduced more dramatically than short movements, likely indicating that people stayed closer to home. We also found that the repeated lockdowns did not reduce their impact on human movement, but the effect of the restrictions on human movement waned as the duration of restrictions increased. Lastly, we found that after restrictions ceased, the subsequent surge in SARS-CoV-2 transmission coincided with a substantial, non-mandated drop in human movement volume. These findings have implications for public health policy makers when faced with anticipating responses to restrictions during future emergency situations.

Evaluating COVID-19-Related Disruptions to Effective Malaria Case Management in 2020-2021 and Its Potential Effects on Malaria Burden in Sub-Saharan Africa

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to far-reaching disruptions to health systems, including preventative and curative services for malaria. The aim of this study was to estimate the magnitude of disruptions in malaria case management in sub-Saharan Africa and their impact on malaria burden during the COVID-19 pandemic. We used survey data collected by the World Health Organization, in which individual country stakeholders reported on the extent of disruptions to malaria diagnosis and treatment. The relative disruption values were then applied to estimates of antimalarial treatment rates and used as inputs to an established spatiotemporal Bayesian geostatistical framework to generate annual malaria burden estimates with case management disruptions. This enabled an estimation of the additional malaria burden attributable to pandemic-related impacts on treatment rates in 2020 and 2021. Our analysis found that disruptions in access to antimalarial treatment in sub-Saharan Africa likely resulted in approximately 5.9 (4.4-7.2 95% CI) million more malaria cases and 76 (20-132) thousand additional deaths in the 2020-2021 period within the study region, equivalent to approximately 1.2% (0.3-2.1 95% CI) greater clinical incidence of malaria and 8.1% (2.1-14.1 95% CI) greater malaria mortality than expected in the absence of the disruptions to malaria case management. The available evidence suggests that access to antimalarials was disrupted to a significant degree and should be considered an area of focus to avoid further escalations in malaria morbidity and mortality. The results from this analysis were used to estimate cases and deaths in the World Malaria Report 2022 during the pandemic years.