glad I saw your post, scouter. I think this is right up your alley.
How does the below work for projecting cases? Say, if there is 10 deaths, does that project out to 1,000 cases or 8,000 potential cases??
Thanks.
“...For example, if modelers assume a case-fatality ratio of 1 percent, and that it usually takes 15 days for an infected person to die, then they know a death reported today in a specific region means that 100 people were likely infected there 15 days ago. Add in the time it takes cases to double—Edmunds says it seems to take five days—then modelers can estimate that over those 15 days the number of cases swelled to 800. So, for every death in a region, that means about 800 others are already infected, most of whom will not have been identified. This pattern was verified in Italy, Edmunds says, which as of today has reported 12,462 cases and 827 deaths. When officials tested people living near where someone had died from the disease, in many cases they found hundreds of others were already carrying the virus.
https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/modelers-struggle-to-predict-the-future-of-the-covid-19-pandemic-67261
I’ve been taking a different approach, but that method seems valid, assuming all the assumptions are correct. That might be a good way of estimating the true number of cases out there, as opposed to the number of confirmed cases.