Estimation of Tunisia COVID-19 infected cases based on mortality rate

Ines Abdeljaoued-Tej; Marc Dhenain

This model inflated the number of cases, but it is at most a preliminary estimate. What is significant, in Tunisia and also in France, is that the public authorities are becoming aware of the necessity to properly quantify the number of deaths. This work raises interesting questions about the relation between the fatality rate and the number of infected cases. Our model used a mortality rate of 2% while several international studies reported rates of 0.7 to 3.6% [10] . Values from 0.5 to 4% could thus be other reasonable options to estimate mortality rate. One of the limitations of our model is that mortality rates can change from one country to another, depending on the distribution of the population in different age groups and on the co-morbidity that have different sensitivities to Covid-19. In the other hand, the ability of the virus to persist in different environments (hot climate) can affect this relation. Hence the importance of comparisons between countries with more and less sunshine, at different seasons and periods.