90% of SARS-CoV-2 infections may have been unreported in CA and FL by Mar 2020(sciencedirect.com)

4 pointsby criticaltinker5 lat temu3 comments

90% of SARS-CoV-2 infections may have been unreported in CA and FL by Mar 2020

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2211379721003302

3 comments

> The first 30 days since the outbreak of the COVID-19 epidemic in the two states (i.e., for the month of March as per the timeline of this study) experienced extremely high level of underreporting, with the estimated average percentages of underreporting being 96.6% for California, and 93.9% for Florida.

> Similar results have been reported by Lau et al. [8]. Based on the reported data till 17 March 2020, they estimated the true number of infecteds to be 53.8 times higher than the reported number of cases in the United States- i.e., 98.1% of the total cases remained unreported.

> Similar situation was also reported by Wu et al. [7], and as per their findings the ratios of estimated cases to confirmed infections in California and Florida till 18 April 2020 were around 17.5 (94.3% underreported cases) and 10 (90% unreported cases), respectively.

icedchai5 lat temu

Not surprising if many of the cases are mild. I would typically multiply any reported number by 10x (earlier in the pandemic) to 3 or 4x (now) to get a better guesstimate.

nradov5 lat temu

The CDC also estimates that actual infections have been about 4× officially reported cases.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...