The Easter and Passover Blip in New York City

Maximilian Vierlboeck; Roshanak R Nilchiani; Christine M Edwards

The first positive COVID-19 case was reported in New York City on March 1 st . Unfortunately, this is only the first confirmed positive case and not necessarily or likely the first case in general. Throughout the spread of the virus, only cases tested positive were reported and therefore a lack of people who carry the virus, but are not aware, has to continuously be assumed. This is further exacerbated by the fact that it is possible to carry the virus without ever showing symptoms [see 18] . Thus, the number of COVID-19 cases resulting from a simulation has to be way higher than what the real data represents. Actual numbers and estimation for the unknown numbers are hard to find and estimations range from over 70 percent unknown cases [19] to ten times the confirmed number or more [20] . Therefore, the number of unknown cases in the model was adjusted so that the model aligned from March 1 st to March 20 th with the reported real time data. In order to achieve this, the model was set to 15 infections at the time of the first reported case. This lead to a realistic outcome of the simulation and also served as verification of the design as the fatality rate and the case numbers correlated with the data when taken into consideration the unknown cases.