Estimating Cases of COVID-19 from Daily Death Data in Italy
Abstract
COVID-19 is an emerging infectious disease which has been declared a pandemic by the World Health Organisation. Due to limited testing capacity for this new virus, variable symptomatology the majority of infected showing non-specific mild or no symptoms it is likely current prevalence data is an underestimate.
Methods
We present an estimate of the number of cases of COVID-19 compared to the number of confirmed case in Italy based on the daily reported deaths and information about the incubation period, time from symptom onset to death and reported case fatality rate.
Results
Our model predicts that on the 31 st of January 2020 when the first 3 infected cases had been identified by Italian authorise there were already nearly 30 cases in Italy, and by the 24th of February 2020 only 0.5% cases had been detected and confirmed by Italian authorities. While official statistics had 132 confirmed case we believe a more accurate estimate would be closer to 26000. With a case-doubling period of about 2.5 days.
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