Estimation of the severeness rate, death rate, household attack rate and the total number of COVID-19 cases based on 16 115 Polish surveillance records
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Abstract
Background
Estimating the actual number of COVID-19 infections is crucial for steering through the COVID-19 pandemic crisis. It is, however, notoriously difficult, as many cases have no or only mild symptoms. Surveillance data for in-household secondary infections offers unbiased samples for COVID-19 prevalence estimation.
Methods
We analyse 16 115 Polish surveillance records to obtain key figures of the COVID-19 pandemic. We propose conservative upper and lower bound estimators for the number of SARS-CoV-2 infections. Further, we estimate age-dependent bounds on the severe case rate, death rate, and the in-household attack rate.
Results
By maximum likelihood estimates, the total number of COVID-19 cases in Poland as of July 22nd, 2020, is at most around 13 times larger and at least 1.6 times larger than the recorded number. The lower bound on the severeness rate ranges between 0.2% for the 0–39 year-old to 5.7% for older than 80, while the upper bound is between 2.6% and 34.1%. The lower bound on the death rate is between 0.04% for the age group 40–59 to 1.34% for the oldest. Overall, the severeness and death rates grow exponentially with age. The in-household attack ratio is 8.18% for the youngest group and 16.88% for the oldest.
Conclusions
The proposed approach derives highly relevant figures on the COVID-19 pandemic from routine surveillance data, under assumption that household members of detected infected are tested and all severe cases are diagnosed.
MOCOS
The MOCOS ( MO delling CO rona S pread) international research group is an interdisciplinary scientific consortium. The following authors are MOCOS members: Barbara Adamik, Marek Bawiec, Viktor Bezborodov, Przemyslaw Biecek, Wolfgang Bock, Marcin Bodych, Jan Pablo Burgard, Tyll Krueger, Agata Migalska, Tomasz Ożański, Barbara Pabjan, Magdalena Rosińska, Piotr Sobczyk and Ewa Szczurek
Article activity feed
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SciScore for 10.1101/2020.10.29.20222513: (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: Thank you for sharing your code.
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:The approach has several limitations. The results depend on the definition of the severe case and how accurately the severe cases are recorded in the data. On top of that, precise recording of the household sizes and their age distribution would lower the variance of our estimations. In conclusion, the method is easily applicable using surveillance data and provides useful information on the severeness and attack rates, as well as the total …
SciScore for 10.1101/2020.10.29.20222513: (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: Thank you for sharing your code.
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:The approach has several limitations. The results depend on the definition of the severe case and how accurately the severe cases are recorded in the data. On top of that, precise recording of the household sizes and their age distribution would lower the variance of our estimations. In conclusion, the method is easily applicable using surveillance data and provides useful information on the severeness and attack rates, as well as the total number of infections and the undiagnosed fraction. In the future, it could be used to continuously monitor the effectiveness of the testing strategy and the proportion of individuals who have already passed the infection. In the example of Poland we show that only a minor part of individuals were already infected and recovered.
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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