Massive social protests amid the pandemic in selected Colombian cities: Did they increase COVID-19 cases? (preprint)

ABSTRACT

Background. Since April 28, 2021, in Colombia there are social protests with numerous demonstrations in various cities. This occurs whereas the country faces the third wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. The aim of this study was to assess the effect of social protests on the number and trend of the confirmed COVID-19 cases in some selected Colombian cities where social protests had more intensity. Methods. We performed and interrupted time-series analysis (ITSA) and Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) models, based on the confirmed COVID-19 cases in Colombia, between March 1 and May 15, 2021, for the cities of Bogota, Cali, Barranquilla, Medellin, and Bucaramanga. The ITSA models estimated the impact of social demonstrations on the number and trend of cases for each city by using Newey-West standard errors and ARIMA models assessed the overall pattern of the series and effect of the intervention. We considered May 2, 2021, as the intervention date for the analysis, five days after social demonstrations started in the country. Findings. During the study period the number of cases by city was 1,014,815 for Bogota, 192,320 for Cali, 175,269 for Barranquilla, 311,904 for Medellin, and 62,512 for Bucaramanga. Heterogeneous results were found among cities. Only for the cities of Cali and Barranquilla statistically significant changes in trend of the number of cases were obtained after the intervention positive in the first city, negative in the second one. None ARIMA models show evidence of abrupt changes in the trend of the series for any city and intervention effect was only positive for Bucaramanga. Interpretation. The findings confer solid evidence that social protests had an heterogenous effect on the number and trend of COVID-19 cases. Divergent effects might be related to the epidemiologic time of the pandemic and the characteristics of the social protests. Assessing the effect of social protests within a pandemic is complex and there are several methodological limitations. Further analyses are required with longer time-series data.