Estimating the Size of the COVID-19 Population in British Columbia Using the Stratified Petersen Estimator
Date
2023-08-30
Authors
Dao, Viet
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Abstract
The presence of undetected COVID-19 cases is a known phenomenon. Mathematical modelling techniques, such as capture-recapture, provide a reliable method for estimating the true size of the infected population. Treating a positive SARS-CoV-2 diagnostic test result as the initial capture and a hospital admission with a COVID-19-related diagnosis code as the recapture, we developed a Lincoln-Petersen model with temporal stratification, taking into account factors that influence the occurrence of captures. Applying this model to repeated patient encounter data collected at the provincial level in British Columbia, we estimated the number of COVID-19 cases among males aged 35 or older during the first week of March 2021. Our analysis revealed that the true number of cases ranged from 4.94 to 9.18 times greater than the number of detected cases.
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Keywords
COVID-19, population estimate, under-reporting, hospitalization, Bayesian MCMC