It has been suspected since the outbreak of SARS-CoV-2, that the bacillus Calmette–Guerin (BCG) vaccine might be providing some protection from the virus. The basis for this suspicion is primarily the observation that countries which had a national BCG vaccination policy seem to have lower number of cases and deaths per million people. The paper titled ”BCG vaccine protection from severe coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID- 19)” by Escobar et al., which appeared in PNAS , (https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2008410117) on October 12, 2020, claims that BCG policy and coverage indeed has a statistically significant effect on the number of deaths per million in a country. In this project, I will comment on and criticize their methodology, and then conduct a much more sophisticated statistical analysis incorporating spatial and/or temporal structure in my models. In the end, I shall provide comments regarding reliability and other issues with my own analysis.
This was my course project for STAT 34900 at UChicago.
I have also included my final project for STAT 34700 (GLMs), since it involved analysis of public coronavirus data.