Inferring the number of COVID-19 cases from recently reported deaths
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Abstract
We estimate the number of COVID-19 cases from newly reported deaths in a population without previous reports. Our results suggest that by the time a single death occurs, hundreds to thousands of cases are likely to be present in that population. This suggests containment via contact tracing will be challenging at this point, and other response strategies should be considered. Our approach is implemented in a publicly available, user-friendly, online tool.
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SciScore for 10.1101/2020.03.10.20033761: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
Institutional Review Board Statement not detected. Randomization not detected. Blinding not detected. Power Analysis not detected. Sex as a biological variable not detected. 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:Several limitations need to be considered when applying our method. First, our approach only applies to the deaths of patients who have become symptomatic in the location considered, which should usually be the case in places where traveller screening is in place. We also assume constant transmissibility (R) over time, which implies …
SciScore for 10.1101/2020.03.10.20033761: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
Institutional Review Board Statement not detected. Randomization not detected. Blinding not detected. Power Analysis not detected. Sex as a biological variable not detected. 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:Several limitations need to be considered when applying our method. First, our approach only applies to the deaths of patients who have become symptomatic in the location considered, which should usually be the case in places where traveller screening is in place. We also assume constant transmissibility (R) over time, which implies that behaviour change and control measures have not taken place yet, and that there is no depletion of susceptible individuals. Consequently, our method should only be used in the early stages of a new epidemic, where these assumptions are reasonable. Similarly, the assumption that each death reflects independent, additive epidemic trajectories is most likely to hold true early on, when reported deaths are close in time (e.g. no more than a week apart). Used on deaths spanning longer time periods, our approach is likely to overestimate epidemic sizes. Contact tracing has been shown to be an efficient control measure when imported cases can be detected early on (14), in addition to permitting the estimation of key epidemiological parameters (11). When the first cases reported in a new location are mostly deaths, however, our results suggest that the underlying size of the epidemic would make control via contact tracing extremely challenging. In such situations, efforts focusing on social distancing measures such as school closures and self-isolation may be more likely to mitigate epidemic spread.
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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