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COVID-19 / Re: Could the infection rate be significantly underestimated?
« on: 19/04/2020 08:38:13 »
The New York data may suggest that we are significantly undercounting the total number of cases. I have a toy mode that pretty accurately matches the UK data so far, but does not allow me to estimate the degree to which we might be undercounting. It does however show that the degree of undercounting could make a big difference to how things might progress in the next month or so in that if the mortality rate is indeed about 1:1000 then we may be getting closer to herd immunity than we realise.
We now appear to have sufficient underused testing capacity that we could get a good idea of the UK undercount by testing people who present at hospitals for other reasons, e.g physical injury (less biased than testing people who are pregnant), and try and arrange things so that the demographics of the people being tested are representative of the UK demographics. A sample size of about 1000 would give a good indication of this and is now within the testing capacity, and would provide very useful data for planning what should be done next.
We now appear to have sufficient underused testing capacity that we could get a good idea of the UK undercount by testing people who present at hospitals for other reasons, e.g physical injury (less biased than testing people who are pregnant), and try and arrange things so that the demographics of the people being tested are representative of the UK demographics. A sample size of about 1000 would give a good indication of this and is now within the testing capacity, and would provide very useful data for planning what should be done next.