Using COVID-19 deaths as a surrogate to measure the progression of the pandemics

  1. Carlos Hernandez-Suarez
  2. Efren Murillo-Zamora

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Abstract

The IFR (Infection Fatality Risk) is one of the most important parameters of an infectious disease. If properly estimated, the observed number of deaths divided by the IFR can be used to estimate the current number of infections and, if immunity is permanent, we can estimate the fraction of susceptible which can be used to plan reopening of activities and vaccine deployment, when these become available. Here we suggest how to use the observed deaths by COVID-19 in an arbitrary population as a surrogate for the progression of the epidemic with the purpose of decision making. We compare several estimates of IFR for SARS-CoV-2 with our estimate that uses the number of additional deaths in households in a database population of 159,150 laboratory-confirmed (RT-qPCR) COVID-19 by SARS-COV-2 in Mexico. The main result is that if the number of deaths in a region is close to 2 per thousand individuals, the fraction of remaining susceptible may be too small for the vaccine to make a difference in the total number of infected.

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  1. Version published to 10.1101/2020.09.27.20202564v2 on medRxiv
  2. ScreenIT

    SciScore for 10.1101/2020.09.27.20202564: (What is this?)

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

    Table 1: Rigor

    Institutional Review Board Statementnot detected.
    Randomizationnot detected.
    Blindingnot detected.
    Power Analysisnot detected.
    Sex as a biological variablenot detected.

    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.
    • No funding statement was detected.
    • No protocol registration statement was detected.

    About SciScore

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  3. Version published to 10.1101/2020.09.27.20202564v1 on medRxiv