Estimating the undetected infections in the Covid-19 outbreak by harnessing capture–recapture methods

ObjectivesA major open question, affecting the decisions of policy makers, is the estimation of the true number of Covid-19 infections. Most of them are undetected, because of a large number of asymptomatic cases. We provide an efficient, easy to compute and robust lower bound estimator for the number of undetected cases.MethodsA modified version of the Chao estimator is proposed, based on the cumulative time-series distributions of cases and...