Estimating the Number of Infected Cases in COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic has caused major disturbance to human life. An important reason behind the widespread social anxiety is the huge uncertainty about the pandemic. A fundamental uncertainty is how many or what percentage of people have been infected. There are published and frequently updated data on various statistics of the pandemic, at local, country or global level. However, due to various reasons, many cases were not included in those reported numbers. We propose a structured approach for the estimation of the number of unreported cases, where we distinguish cases that arrive late in the reported numbers and those who had mild or no symptoms and thus were not captured by any medical system at all. We use post-report data for the estimation of the former and population matching to the latter. We estimate that the reported number of infected cases in the US should be corrected by multiplying a factor of 220.54% as of Apr 20, 2020, while the infection ratio out of the US population is estimated to be 0.53%, implying a case mortality rate at 2.85% which is close to the 3.4% suggested by the WHO in Mar 2020. Towards the end of the summer of 2020, the overall infection ratio of the US rises to 2.49% while the case mortality decreases to 2.09%, and the ratio of asymptomatic cases out of all infected cases reduces from the pre-summer 35-40% to around 20-25%.