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

Rahul Potluri; Deepthi Lavu

Given that this is a highly contagious disease that spreads very quickly, if a large part of the population suffer from the disease in a short space of time, even if majority of cases are mild, a small minority of severe/critical cases will still lead to significant pressures on healthcare systems as now seen in Italy, Spain and the USA (particularly New York). Globally lockdowns have been instated to reduce the spread of infection, allow the healthcare systems to cope with the condition and "flatten the curve" of the pandemic. These were not enforced all at once and the projections in table 3 are based on the data available on 4/4/2020 and a snapshot depending on the actions, policies of individual countries. Much more complex models have been undertaken by different groups which included time as a variable 20 . However, we propose that testing rate is a very important parameter in projecting the outcomes of the pandemic. Therefore, whilst it seems far-fetched to suggest that Indonesia may end up with over 7 million deaths from less than 2000 cases reported so far, we have . CC-BY 4.0 International license It is made available under a is the author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity.