ADDRESSING SELECTION BIAS AND MEASUREMENT ERROR IN COVID-19 CASE COUNT DATA USING AUXILIARY INFORMATION.

ABSTRACT: Coronavirus case-count data has influenced government policies and drives most epidemiological forecasts. Limited testing is cited as the key driver behind minimal information on the COVID-19 pandemic. While expanded testing is laudable, measurement error and selection bias are the two greatest problems limiting our understanding of the COVID-19 pandemic; neither can be fully addressed by increased testing capacity. In this paper, we demonstrate their impact on estimation of point prevalence and the effective reproduction number. We show that estimates based on the millions of molecular tests in the US has the same mean square error as a small simple random sample. To address this, a procedure is presented that combines case-count data and random samples over time to estimate selection pro

SUBMITTER: Dempsey W 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11210953 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature