Abstract
Confirmed cases of the disease COVID-19 have spread to more than 200 countries and regions of the world within a few months. Although the authorities report the number of new cases on daily basis, there remains a gap between the number of reported cases and actual number of cases in a population. One way to bridge this gap is to gain more in-depth understanding of the disease. In this paper, we have used the recent findings about the clinical courses of inpatients with COVID-19 to reset the initial conditions of the epidemic process in order to estimate more realistic number of cases in the population. By translating the reported cases certain number of days earlier with regard to an average clinical course of the disease, we have obtained much higher number of cases, which suggests that the actual number of infected cases and death rate might have been higher than reported. Based on the outbreak of COVID-19 in Italy, this paper shows an estimate of the number of infected cases based on infection and removal rates from data during the pandemic.
Highlights
Since appearing in Wuhan, China, in December 2019, the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 has spread to more than 200 countries and regions worldwide, according to data compiled by the U.S based Johns Hopkins University [1]
EMPIRICAL RESULTS For most host-pathogen models of the infectious disease, the key parameters are difficult to estimate because natural processes are stochastic and transmission events are influenced by other parameters than what can be included in a model of epidemic spread [31]
The epidemiological data of the COVID-19 contains a set of variables and their values for both reported and reset data; the cumulative number of the infected individuals (I/I’), the cumulative removed infectives (R/R’ – these include the death and recovered cases), the infection rate (β/β’) and the removal rate (γ /γ ’)
Summary
Since appearing in Wuhan, China, in December 2019, the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 has spread to more than 200 countries and regions worldwide, according to data compiled by the U.S based Johns Hopkins University [1]. The outbreak was declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern on January 30, 2020 and progressed to become a global pandemic on March 11, 2020 [2]. By mid-March 2020, Europe was declared the world’s major epicenter, and Italy was the first country in Europe to witness a widespread outbreak of the SARS-CoV-2 [3]. Certain health officials believed that the SARS-CoV-2 virus arrived in Italy long before the first case was discovered [5]. Before the first case was reported, there was an unusually high number of pneumonia cases recorded at certain hospital in northern Italy, suggesting it was possible that the patients with the SARS-CoV-2 were treated as if they
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