Estimating the Fraction of Unreported Infections in Epidemics with a Known Epicenter: An Application to COVID-19

Abstract

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The Cost of Privacy: Welfare Effects of the Disclosure of Covid-19 Cases

“…Second, we target the fraction of undetected infections from the estimates in Stock et al (2020), who use results from Iceland's two testing programs and estimate that the fraction of undetected infections range from 88.7% to 93.6%. We target a fraction of 90% undetected infections, which are also consistent with the estimates for the US in Hortaçsu et al (2020). The calibrated values of β and d I are 0.1504 and 0.0163, respectively; we show sensitivity analysis to these values below.…”

Estimating Unreported COVID-19 Cases in the United States Based on the tvSIRu Model

“…32-185.66 (mean=38), and the IFR range is 0.037%--2.20%(mean=0.21%). Comparing with related research on 20 US counties which have UIR of 4.32 -776.68(mean=27.7) and IFR of 0.02% -1.81%(mean=0.027%), the range of UIR estimated in this paper is more concentrated, and the IFRs has similar upper boundary27 . Four states' upper boundary of UIR had been reported in the previous study: Illinois(40.86), Massachusetts(38.28), New Jersey(29.22), and New York(35.17)19 , of which the first three are similar to the value estimated by SIRu, which are 41.51, 39.22 and31.83, only New York had a different value of 7.32.…”

The Persuasive Effect of Fox News: Non-Compliance with Social Distancing During the Covid-19 Pandemic

“…First, to the best of our knowledge, COVID-19-related cases and deaths are tracked at the more aggregate county level and not at the zipcode level. Second, at the time of writing, experts still disagreed about the accuracy and reliability of current data which would limit the interpretabilty of any association we might find with our behavioral outcomes (e.g., Nishiura et al (2020) and Akhmetzhanov et al (2020)); although Hortacsu et al (2020) have developed a promising approach to infer the number of unreported infections. Multiple studies have pointed towards the importance of social distancing for containing the disease (Matrajt and Leung, 2020;Kissler et al, 2020b).…”