Use of Unofficial Newspaper Data for COVID-19 Death Surveillance

Ahamad, Mazbahul G; Ahmed, Monir U; Talukder, Byomkesh; Tanin, Fahian

Objective. To highlight the critical importance of unofficially reported newspaper-based deaths from coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID 19) like illness (CLI) together with officially confirmed death counts to support improvements in COVID 19 death surveillance. Methods. Both hospital-based official COVID 19 and unofficial CLI death counts were collected from daily newspapers between March 8 and August 22, 2020. We performed both exploratory and time-series analyses to understand the influence of combining newspaper-based CLI death counts with confirmed hospital death counts on the trends and forecasting of COVID-19 death counts. An autoregressive integrated moving average based approach was used to forecast the number of weekly death counts for six weeks ahead. Results. Between March 8 and August 22, 2020, 2,156 CLI deaths were recorded based on newspaper reporting for a count that was 55% of the officially confirmed death count (n = 3,907). This shows that newspaper reports tend to cover a significant number of COVID-19 related deaths. Our forecast also indicates an approximate total of 406 CLI expected for the six weeks ahead, which could contribute to a total of 2,413 deaths including 2,007 confirmed deaths expected from August 23 to October 3, 2020. Conclusions. Analyzing existing trends in and forecasting the expected number of newspaper based CLI deaths indicates yet-unreported COVID-19 death counts, which could be a critical source to estimate provisional COVID 19 death counts and mortality surveillance. Public Health Implications. Considering unofficial newspaper-based CLI death counts is essential to identify COVID-19 death severity and surveillance needs to advance public health research efforts to prepare appropriate response strategies for low- and middle-income countries.