According to a report by University of Göttingen researchers Christian Bommer and Sebastian Vollmer, the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases officially issued by countries dramatically understates the true number of infections.
Average detection rate of COVID-19 is estimated around 6%. Image credit: Rosario ‘Charo’ Gutierrez, U.S. Air Force.
To test the quality of official case records, Professor Vollmer and Dr. Bommer analyzed data from a recent study published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases.
Their data show that countries have only discovered on average about 6% of coronavirus infections and the true number of infected people worldwide may already have reached several tens of millions.
Insufficient and delayed testing may explain why some European countries, such as Italy and Spain, are experiencing much higher casualty numbers (relative to reported confirmed cases) than Germany, which has detected an estimated 15.6% of infections compared to only 3.5% in Italy or 1.7% in Spain.
Detection rates are even lower in the United States (1.6%) and the United Kingdom (1.2%) — two countries that have received widespread criticism from public health experts for their delayed response to the pandemic.
In sharp contrast to this, South Korea appears to have discovered almost half of all its COVID-19 infections.
The scientists estimate that on March 31, 2020, Germany had 460,000 infections.
Based on the same method, they calculate that the United States had more than 10 million, Spain more than 5 million, Italy around 3 million and the United Kingdom around 2 million infections.
On the same day the Johns Hopkins University reported that globally there were less than 900,000 confirmed cases, meaning that the vast majority of infections were undetected.
“These results mean that governments and policy-makers need to exercise extreme caution when interpreting case numbers for planning purposes,” Professor Vollmer said.
“Such extreme differences in the amount and quality of testing carried out in different countries mean that official case records are largely uninformative and do not provide helpful information.”
“Major improvements in the ability of countries to detect new infections and contain the virus are urgently needed,” Dr. Bommer said.
_____
Christian Bommer & Sebastian Vollmer. 2020. Average detection rate of SARS-CoV-2 infections is estimated around six percent.
This article is based on text provided by the University of Göttingen.
