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

Rahul Potluri; Deepthi Lavu

(which was not peer-reviewed) The copyright holder for this preprint . https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.04.06.20054239 doi: medRxiv preprint accurate. Therefore, we further undertook a consistent adjustment according to countries which performed the most tests; in favour of larger countries with bigger populations we chose an arbitrary cut off of 100,000 tests per country. 15 countries had undertaken more than 100,000 tests and as all these countries showed differences in their cases/test and deaths/test we took the 15 country group as a whole to obtain an adjustment factor according to the cases/test and deaths/test. Using this we derived a case per test rate of 13.53% and a death per test rate of 0.77% for the 15 country group. Based on the above numbers, we extrapolated figures at the population level for all 50 countries to calculate the predicated number of cases and deaths.