Covid-19 modeling

I have officially thrown my hat into the ring and joined the throngs of would-be Covid-19 modelers to try to estimate (I deliberately do not use predict) the progression of the pandemic. I will pull rank and declare that I kind of do this type of thing for a living. What I (and my colleagues whom I have conscripted) are trying to do is to estimate the fraction of the population that has the SARS-CoV-2 virus but has not been identified as such. This was the goal of the Lourenco et al. paper I wrote about previously that pulled me into this pit of despair. I argued that fitting to deaths alone, which is what they do, is insufficient for constraining the model and thus it has no predictive ability. What I’m doing now is seeing whether it is possible to do the job if you fit not only deaths but also the number of cases reported and cases recovered. You then have a latent variable model where the observed variables are cases, cases that die, and cases that recover, and the latent variables are the infected that are not identified and the susceptible population. Our plan is to test a wide range of models with various degrees of detail and complexity and use Bayesian Model Comparison to see which does a better job. We will apply the analysis to global data. We’re getting numbers now but I’m not sure I trust them yet so I’ll keep computing for a few more days. The full goal is to quantify the uncertainty in a principled way.

2020-04-06: edited for purging typos