Making sense of the Global Coronavirus Data: The role of testing rates in understanding the pandemic and our exit strategy

Rahul Potluri; Deepthi Lavu

The copyright holder for this preprint . https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.04.06.20054239 doi: medRxiv preprint Discussion COVID-19 statistics are complex and comparing different countries based on number of total cases, deaths and/or case fatality rate does not show the complete picture (Table 1) . A common denominator is required to make senses of these numbers and we propose that this denominator is the number of diagnostic tests performed. In our analyses we showed the deaths and cases in relation to the number of tests performed and presented population level pandemic projections based on these. This is particularly relevant in the current environment where testing parameters vary across different countries leading to non-uniformity in projections. It is important to discuss each of our different analyses in turn, the rationale, drawbacks and what it means for different countries.