Estimating the Number of Infected Cases in COVID-19 Pandemic
Volume 19, Issue 2 (2021): Special issue: Continued Data Science Contributions to COVID-19 Pandemic, pp. 348–364
Pub. online: 23 February 2021
Type: Statistical Data Science
Received
7 December 2020
7 December 2020
Accepted
10 January 2021
10 January 2021
Published
23 February 2021
23 February 2021
Abstract
It is widely acknowledged that the reported numbers of infected cases with COVID-19 were not complete. A structured approach is proposed where we distinguish cases reflected later in the numbers of confirmed cases and those with mild or no symptoms thus not captured by any systems at all. The number of infected cases in the US is estimated to be 220.54% of that reported as of Apr 20, 2020. This implies an overall infection ratio of 0.53%, and a case mortality rate at 2.85% which is close to the 3.4% suggested by WHO in March 2020.
Supplementary material
Supplementary MaterialIn the online supplementary, we provide all R scripts and datasets used to produce the figures and results reported in the paper. All the R scripts are placed in the main directory of a .zip archive, along with a dataset for 2020 US population and a README document that briefly describes the R scripts and the datasets. Data collected as of Apr 20, 2020 and Aug 31, 2020 are placed in respective subdirectories; there is a separate time series dataset for each US state with such information as the report case numbers, death tolls etc.
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