Estimation of the Number of General Anesthesia Cases Based on a Series of Nationwide Surveys on Twitter during COVID-19 Pandemic in Japan: A Statistical Analysis

Abstract

Background and objectives: Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), has spread to more than 200 countries. In light of this situation, the Japanese Government declared a state of emergency in seven regions of Japan on 7 April 2020 under the provisions of the law. The medical care delivery system has been under pressure. Although various surgical societies have published guidelines on which to base their surgical decisions, it is not clear how general anesthesia has been performed and will be performed in Japan. Materials and Methods: One of the services provided by the social network service Twitter is a voting function—Twitter Polls—through which anonymous surveys were conducted. We analyzed the results of a series of surveys 17 times over 22 weeks on Twitter on the status of operating restrictions using quadratic programming to solve the mathematical optimizing problem, and public data provided by the Japanese Government were used to estimate the current changes in the number of general anesthesia performed in Japan. Results: The minimum number of general anesthesia cases per week was estimated at 67.1% compared to 2015 on 27 April 2020. The timeseries trend was compatible with the results reported by the Japanese Society of Anesthesiologists (correlation coefficient r = 0.69, p < 0.001). Conclusions: The number of general anesthesia was reduced up to two-thirds during the pandemic of COVID-19 in Japan and was successfully quantitatively estimated using a quick questionnaire on Twitter.

Impact of the First Wave of COVID-19 on the Number of General Anesthesia Cases in 34 Tertiary Hospitals in Japan: A Multicenter Retrospective Study

“…During the period we investigated, the decrease in the number of GA cases in April and May 2020 was particularly noticeable ( Figure 1 and Table 1 ). These results are consistent with the results of previous studies conducted in Japan using Twitter Polls [ 9 ]. Given the correlation between the rate of decrease in GA cases and the number of patients with COVID-19, it is reasonable to interpret that the number of GA cases decreased due to the COVID-19 pandemic.…”