A Sequential Cross-Sectional Analysis Producing Robust Weekly COVID-19 Rates for South East Asian Countries.

The COVID-19 pandemic has expanded fast over the world, affecting millions of people and generating serious health, social, and economic consequences. All South East Asian countries have experienced the pandemic, with various degrees of intensity and response. As the pandemic progresses, it is important to track and analyse disease trends and patterns to guide public health policy and treatments. In this paper, we carry out a sequential cross-sectional study to produce reliable weekly COVID-19 death (out of cases) rates for South East Asian countries for the calendar years 2020, 2021, and 2022. The main objectives of this study are to characterise the trends and patterns of COVID-19 death rates in South East Asian countries through time, as well as compare COVID-19 rates among countries and regions in South East Asia. Our raw data are (daily) case and death counts acquired from "Our World in Data", which, however, for some countries and time periods, suffer from sparsity (zero or small counts), and therefore require a modelling approach where information is adaptively borrowed from the overall dataset where required. Therefore, a sequential cross-sectional design will be utilised, that will involve examining the data week by week, across all countries. Methodologically, this is achieved through a two-stage random effect shrinkage approach, with estimation facilitated by nonparametric maximum likelihood.

Hot spots in mortality from drug poisoning in the United States, 2007-2009.

Over the past several years, the death rate associated with drug poisoning has increased by over 300% in the U.S. Drug poisoning mortality varies widely by state, but geographic variation at the substate level has largely not been explored. National mortality data (2007-2009) and small area estimation methods were used to predict age-adjusted death rates due to drug poisoning at the county level, which were then mapped in order to explore: whether drug poisoning mortality clusters by county, and where hot and cold spots occur (i.e., groups of counties that evidence extremely high or low age-adjusted death rates due to drug poisoning). Results highlight several regions of the U.S. where the burden of drug poisoning mortality is especially high. Findings may help inform efforts to address the growing problem of drug poisoning mortality by indicating where the epidemic is concentrated geographically.