We already knew that there is an underreporting of the number of real infections with Covid-19 worldwide, because simply not everyone is tested. In a new study, Belgium, along with Italy, the United Kingdom and France, dangles somewhere at the bottom, with detection of less than 10 percent of the actual number of infections. In Italy, it is estimated that there are even 17.5 times more cases than the confirmed ones.
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Joeri Vlemings
18-11-20, 11:01
Latest update:
11:38
Source:
Royal Society Publishing
Australian scientists examined data from eleven European countries as well as Australia, Canada, South Korea and the US to estimate the real number of corona infections of more than 800 million inhabitants. Their analysis shows that between March and August, the infection rate in those 15 countries was on average 6.2 times higher than the confirmed cases: 49.7 million cases compared to 8 million. “This has important implications for control and risk of contamination,” says Professor Quentin Grafton of the Australian National University. The worst students in the class are Belgium, France, England and Italy, where less than 10 percent of the real number of infections was detected.
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On the other side are South Korea and Australia, which came closest to the number of actual cases reported in late April, but still had an infection rate estimated at the end of August five times higher than what was officially reported. In Australia, 0.48 percent of the population, or 130,000 people, could be infected, while the confirmed cases amounted to 0.10 percent of the population. South Korea was estimated to have 2.6 times more Covid-19 infections than the confirmed cases.
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The researchers used the so-called ‘backcasting’ method. “Simply put, we analyzed statistics on how many people in a particular country had died from Covid-19 and then worked backwards to see how many people would have had to be infected to get to that number of deaths,” explains Steven Phipps of Ikigai Research . Deaths from Covid-19 were compared to the time between infection and symptoms and between symptoms and death. “Our method is a new and easy-to-use way to estimate the true number of infections, as long as there is reliable data on the number of fatalities attributable to Covid-19.” According to the scientists, this gives a confidence interval of 95 percent for the estimated real contamination rate in the population.
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