Estimating Cases of COVID-19 from Daily Death Data in Italy

  1. Ali Raheem

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Abstract

COVID-19 is an emerging infectious disease which has been declared a pandemic by the World Health Organisation. Due to limited testing capacity for this new virus, variable symptomatology the majority of infected showing non-specific mild or no symptoms it is likely current prevalence data is an underestimate.

We present an estimate of the number of cases of COVID-19 compared to the number of confirmed case in Italy based on the daily reported deaths and information about the incubation period, time from symptom onset to death and reported case fatality rate.

Results

Our model predicts that on the 31 st of January 2020 when the first 3 infected cases had been identified by Italian authorise there were already nearly 30 cases in Italy, and by the 24th of February 2020 only 0.5% cases had been detected and confirmed by Italian authorities. While official statistics had 132 confirmed case we believe a more accurate estimate would be closer to 26000. With a case-doubling period of about 2.5 days.

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  1. ScreenIT

    SciScore for 10.1101/2020.03.17.20037697: (What is this?)

    Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

    Table 1: Rigor

    NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.

    Table 2: Resources

    No key resources detected.

    Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).

    Results from LimitationRecognizer: An explicit section about the limitations of the techniques employed in this study was not found. We encourage authors to address study limitations.

    Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.

    Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.

    Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.

    Results from rtransparent:
    • Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • No protocol registration statement was detected.

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  2. Version published to 10.1101/2020.03.17.20037697 on medRxiv