ArticleArchives of public health = Archives belges de sante publique2021
Conceptual causal framework to assess the effect of SARS-CoV-2 variants on COVID-19 disease severity among hospitalized patients.
Article in Archives of public health = Archives belges de sante publique, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers.
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Who cites it
14 citing papers in PubMed, 15 citations in OpenAlex.
- Integrating Genomic Data into Test-negative Designs for Estimating Lineage-specific COVID-19 Vaccine Effectiveness.Clinical infectious diseases : an official publication of the Infectious Diseases Society of America · 2026Article
- The role of vaccination, underlying health conditions, and working in healthcare in the socioeconomic disparities in COVID-19 hospitalization: a mediation analysis using interventional effect models.BMC infectious diseases · 2026Article
- Impact of Noradrenaline Administration Dosage on the Occurrence of Peripheral Intravenous Catheter-Related Venous Phlebitis in Critically Ill Patients Using a Time-Dependent Multilevel Cox Regression Model.Emergency medicine international · 2025Article
- Area and individual level analyses of demographic and socio-economic disparities in COVID-19 vaccination uptake in Belgium.Vaccine: X · 2024Article
- The impact of quality-adjusted life years on evaluating COVID-19 mitigation strategies: lessons from age-specific vaccination roll-out and variants of concern in Belgium (2020-2022).BMC public health · 2024Article
- Sociodemographic and socioeconomic disparities in COVID-19 vaccine uptake in Belgium: a nationwide record linkage study.Journal of epidemiology and community health · 2023Article
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- Evaluating methodological approaches to assess the severity of infection with SARS-CoV-2 variants: scoping review and applications on Belgian COVID-19 data.BMC infectious diseases · 2022Article
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- Incidence and Risk Factors of COVID-19 Vaccine Breakthrough Infections: A Prospective Cohort Study in Belgium.Viruses · 2022Article
- Severity of infection with the SARS-CoV-2 B.1.1.7 lineage among hospitalized COVID-19 patients in Belgium.PloS one · 2022Observational
- A Secure Artificial Intelligence-Enabled Critical Sars Crisis Management Using Random Sigmoidal Artificial Neural Networks.Frontiers in public health · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
12 authors at 3 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundSARS-CoV-2 strains evolve continuously and accumulate mutations in their genomes over the course of the pandemic. The severity of a SARS-CoV-2 infection could partly depend on these viral genetic characteristics. Here, we present a general conceptual framework that allows to study the effect of SARS-CoV-2 variants on COVID-19 disease severity among hospitalized patients.
methodsA causal model is defined and visualized using a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG), in which assumptions on the relationship between (confounding) variables are made explicit. Various DAGs are presented to explore specific study design options and the risk for selection bias. Next, the data infrastructure specific to the COVID-19 surveillance in Belgium is described, along with its strengths and weaknesses for the study of clinical impact of variants. DISCUSSION: A well-established framework that provides a complete view on COVID-19 disease severity among hospitalized patients by combining information from different sources on host factors, viral factors, and healthcare-related factors, will enable to assess the clinical impact of emerging SARS-CoV-2 variants and answer questions that will be raised in the future. The framework shows the complexity related to causal research, the corresponding data requirements, and it underlines important limitations, such as unmeasured confounders or selection bias, inherent to repurposing existing routine COVID-19 data registries.
trial registrationEach individual research project within the current conceptual framework will be prospectively registered in Open Science Framework (OSF identifier: https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/UEF29 ). OSF project created on 18 May 2021.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.