Related papers: What can we learn about SARS-CoV-2 prevalence from…
There are many sources of data giving information about the number of SARS-CoV-2 infections in the population, but all have major drawbacks, including biases and delayed reporting. For example, the number of confirmed cases largely…
Using recent data from voluntary mass testing, I provide credible bounds on prevalence of SARS-CoV-2 for Austrian counties in early December 2020. When estimating prevalence, a natural missing data problem arises: no test results are…
As a consequence of missing data on tests for infection and imperfect accuracy of tests, reported rates of population infection by the SARS CoV-2 virus are lower than actual rates of infection. Hence, reported rates of severe illness…
Globally the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus has infected more than 59 million people and killed more than 1.39 million. Designing and monitoring interventions to slow and stop the spread of the virus require knowledge of how many people have been…
Monitoring the incidence of new infections during a pandemic is critical for an effective public health response. General population prevalence surveys for SARS-CoV-2 can provide high-quality data to estimate incidence. However, estimation…
The rapid spread of the new SARS-CoV-2 virus triggered a global health crisis disproportionately impacting people with pre-existing health conditions and particular demographic and socioeconomic characteristics. One of the main concerns of…
Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, government policy and healthcare implementation responses have been guided by reported positivity rates and counts of positive cases in the community. The selection bias of these data calls into question…
Governments and public health authorities use seroprevalence studies to guide responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. Seroprevalence surveys estimate the proportion of individuals who have detectable SARS-CoV-2 antibodies. However, serologic…
Estimation of prevalence of undocumented SARS-CoV-2 infections is critical for understanding the overall impact of the Covid-19 disease. In fact, unveiling uncounted cases has fundamental implications for public policy interventions…
We estimate the reduction in transmission of SARS-CoV-2 achievable by surveillance testing of a susceptible population at different frequencies, comparing the cases of both the original Wuhan strain and the Delta variant. We estimate the…
Explicit knowledge of total community-level immune seroprevalence is critical to developing policies to mitigate the social and clinical impact of SARS-CoV-2. Publicly available vaccination data are frequently cited as a proxy for…
Large-scale testing is considered key to assess the state of the current COVID-19 pandemic. Yet, the link between the reported case numbers and the true state of the pandemic remains elusive. We develop mathematical models based on…
According to the current perception, symptomatic, presymptomatic, and asymptomatic infectious persons can infect the healthy population susceptible to the SARS-Cov-2. More importantly, various reports indicate that the number of…
Mina and Andersen, authors of the Perspectives in Science: COVID-19 Testing: One Size Does Not Fit All have referred to results and adopted conclusions from recently published governmental report Pavelka et al. "The effectiveness of…
Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a rapidly emerging respiratory disease caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). Due to the rapid human-to-human transmission of SARS-CoV-2, many healthcare systems…
This note considers the problem of conducting statistical inference on the share of individuals in some subgroup of a population that experience some event. The specific complication is that the size of the subgroup needs to be estimated,…
Countries officially record the number of COVID-19 cases based on medical tests of a subset of the population with unknown participation bias. For prevalence estimation, the official information is typically discarded and, instead, small…
The effect of masking the general population on a COVID-19 epidemic is estimated by computer simulation using two separate state-of-the-art web-based softwares, one of them calibrated for the SARS-CoV-2 virus. The questions addressed are…
We propose a partial identification method for estimating disease prevalence from serology studies. Our data are results from antibody tests in some population sample, where the test parameters, such as the true/false positive rates, are…
Mechanistic models fit to streaming surveillance data are critical to understanding the transmission dynamics of an outbreak as it unfolds in real-time. However, transmission model parameter estimation can be imprecise, and sometimes even…