Estimating Spot Prevalence of COVID-19 from Daily Death Data in Italy

Ali Raheem

The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not peer-reviewed) is the . https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.03.17.20037697 doi: medRxiv preprint cases from daily deaths of COVID-19. Increasing the mortality would reduce the estimated prevalence but this alone could not make the estimates agree with the confirmed cases in order of magnitude due to our models robustness to varying case fatality ratio in the region of current estimates. This methodology would be applicable to many other conditions and relies only on accurate estimate of deaths due to the condition which can easily be confirmed post-mortem and case mortality (when lower end estimates are above 2%). Without incubation date or data on disease progression an accurate estimate can still be produced but will not provide temporal information but could be used to estimate the time from infection to death.