[Teichopsia]

Layman with absolutely no understanding about any of this.

I currently live in a country with absolutely no infrastructure to handle this. Our first confirmed case was reported almost three weeks ago. Within a week we ran out of testing kits.

Last night I started researching on the topic to see if there is a formula to calculate the current number of infected people in the country. I don't care about accuracy, it just needs to give an approximate.

The current official figure is less than ten and I feel that by having an estimate (from what I've been able to read, time is a bad indicator, it is what it is) it would help change what I believe to be a false sense of security if one is looking at the official figures.

Is there any such formula or should I use the SIR model? (which currently is a bit over my head)

[the_crocodile]

Tomas Pueyo published an article: https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-act-today-or-peop...

He wrote a model that roughly estimates infection rates in a population based on either deaths or confirmed cases: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/1/d/17YyCmjb2Z2QwMiRR...

The model is oriented around companies, but could be applied to any gathering of people. There may be more sophisticated or accurate models out there, but I found his relatively quick to understand and apply.

[Teichopsia]

Thanks.

[jaydaigle]

I'm a bit late to this, sorry; one of my students let me know this thread existed!

I want to encourage you not to try to use this formula or anything like it to make concrete predictions. You are, unfortunately, right that the numbers we have access to are crap. But that doesn't mean that our modeling will be any better; we'd need to use the public numbers as input. And those public numbers are crap.

There are people whose entire job is to figure out ways to make useful predictions from the information we have. Their estimates aren't great, in part because the numbers they're using as input are crap.

But the numbers they have for input are as good as what we have, so we're unlikely to manage better. And in the worst case we can easily Epstein ourselves and generate predictions that are wildly, embarrassingly off the mark.

I'm not saying you should trust the official or expert numbers. But they're almost certainly better than what you'll manage on your own.