Related papers: An unbiased estimator of the case fatality rate

Different ways of calculating mortality ratios during epidemics have yielded very different results, particularly during the current COVID-19 pandemic. We formulate both a survival probability model and an associated infection…

The relative case fatality rates (CFRs) between groups and countries are key measures of relative risk that guide policy decisions regarding scarce medical resource allocation during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. In the middle of an active…

A key challenge in estimating the infection fatality rate (IFR) -- and its relation with various factors of interest -- is determining the total number of cases. The total number of cases is not known because not everyone is tested, but…

The infection fatality rate (IFR) of COVID-19 is one of the measures of disease impact that can be of importance for policy making. Here we show that many of the studies on which these estimates are based are scientifically flawed for…

The rapidly spreading Covid-19 that affected almost all countries, was first reported at the end of 2019. As a consequence of its highly infectious nature, countries all over the world have imposed extremely strict measures to control its…

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused major disturbance to human life. An important reason behind the widespread social anxiety is the huge uncertainty about the pandemic. A fundamental uncertainty is how many or what percentage of people have…

The determination of the infection fatality rate (IFR) for the novel SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus is a key aim for many of the field studies that are currently being undertaken in response to the pandemic. The IFR together with the basic…

The case fatality ratio (CFR) for COVID-19 is difficult to estimate. One difficulty is due to ignoring or overestimating time delay between reporting and death. We claim that all of these cause large errors and artificial time dependence of…

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…

This article presents a new model to predict the evolution of infective diseases under uncertainty or low-quality information, just as it has happened in the initial scenario during the CoVid-19 spread in China and Europe. The model has…

Factors such as non-uniform definitions of mortality, uncertainty in disease prevalence, and biased sampling complicate the quantification of fatality during an epidemic. Regardless of the employed fatality measure, the infected population…

Knowing the true effect size of clinical interventions in randomised clinical trials is key to informing the public health policies. Vaccine efficacy is defined in terms of the relative risk or the ratio of two disease risks. However, only…

There are many hard-to-reconcile numbers circulating concerning Covid-19. Using reports from random testing, the fatality ratio per infection is evaluated and used to extract further information on the actual fraction of infections and the…

We introduce a new probabilistic model to estimate the real spread of the novel SARS-CoV-2 virus along regions or countries. Our model simulates the behavior of each individual in a population according to a probabilistic model through an…

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…

To make informative public policy decisions in battling the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, it is important to know the disease prevalence in a population. There are two intertwined difficulties in estimating this prevalence based on testing…

SARS-CoV-2 has disrupted the life of billions of people around the world since the first outbreak was officially declared in China at the beginning of 2020. Yet, important questions such as how deadly it is or its degree of spread within…

Knowing the infection fatality ratio (IFR) is of crucial importance for evidence-based epidemic management: for immediate planning; for balancing the life years saved against the life years lost due to the consequences of management; and…

The infection fatality rate (IFR) of the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) is one of the most discussed figures in the context of this pandemic. Using German COVID-19 surveillance data and age-group specific IFR estimates from multiple…

The Infection Fatality Rate (IFR) of COVID-19 is difficult to estimate because the number of infections is unknown and there is a lag between each infection and the potentially subsequent death. We introduce a new approach for estimating…