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

Rahul Potluri; Deepthi Lavu

Where does all of this leave us and what is the point of all these statistics and analyses? Clearly from the example of South Korea we can contain COVID-19 and in spite of differences of the specific policies of lockdown between countries, social distancing and limiting spread are the broad themes to take forward. The analyses in this study highlight the importance of testing as the relevant denominator for which all the COVID-19 data should be related to. The testing policy is advocated strongly by the WHO in their COVID-19 statements 1 . The suggested early indication of a low mortality rate from our analyses, coupled with the fact that COVID-19 is a new disease affecting the globe in a short time, it is highly plausible that the serious cases and deaths we are seeing in the some countries may be the tip of the iceberg of a disease that has spread widely. If we look at influenza data there are millions of cases and up to half a million deaths worldwide every year due to flu and these tend to be seasonal in spite of vaccination programmes and herd immunity to some extent [27] [28] [29] [30] . In the case of COVID-19 we might be experiencing the full whammy of a disease without . 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.