It seems to me that there are reasons why you would want to track the infection rate separately from severity.
Most notably, if you are in an at risk population, it is more likely that you’ll come down with a severe case, if you catch it. And in that case, you just want to know how many people are infected, even is they only have mild symptoms.
As I’m currently modeling it, you just include the consideration of “what if there are lots of mild cases that we don’t know about yet” in your estimate of the confirmation rate.
Most notably, if you are in an at risk population, it is more likely that you’ll come down with a severe case, if you catch it. And in that case, you just want to know how many people are infected, even is they only have mild symptoms.
Yeah, this is a good point. Intuitively, currently case fatality rate gives you Death given Severity (under the assumption we mostly only detect severe cases), and you need to estimate Severity given Infected. Probably when using my method you’d need to estimate the ratio of your Severity given Infected to the “average” Severity given Infected.
That said, for anyone not significantly at-risk, I’d still recommend working directly with severe cases (and I’d probably still recommend it for people who are at-risk, though the benefits are a lot lower because you have to do the very-uncertain Severity given Infected ratio estimate).
As I’m currently modeling it, you just include the consideration of “what if there are lots of mild cases that we don’t know about yet” in your estimate of the confirmation rate.
Yes, but it introduces a lot of uncertainty / variance in the model’s output, which ideally you could remove.
It seems to me that there are reasons why you would want to track the infection rate separately from severity.
Most notably, if you are in an at risk population, it is more likely that you’ll come down with a severe case, if you catch it. And in that case, you just want to know how many people are infected, even is they only have mild symptoms.
As I’m currently modeling it, you just include the consideration of “what if there are lots of mild cases that we don’t know about yet” in your estimate of the confirmation rate.
Yeah, this is a good point. Intuitively, currently case fatality rate gives you Death given Severity (under the assumption we mostly only detect severe cases), and you need to estimate Severity given Infected. Probably when using my method you’d need to estimate the ratio of your Severity given Infected to the “average” Severity given Infected.
That said, for anyone not significantly at-risk, I’d still recommend working directly with severe cases (and I’d probably still recommend it for people who are at-risk, though the benefits are a lot lower because you have to do the very-uncertain Severity given Infected ratio estimate).
Yes, but it introduces a lot of uncertainty / variance in the model’s output, which ideally you could remove.