Epidemiologists using Stan to estimate COVID-19 case fatality ratio

Not my work, but it might be interesting to the Stan community.

There’s a preprint by a group at Bern that uses Stan to estimate the case-fatality ratio for COVID-19, accounting for surveillance bias (failure to count all infected people) and right-censorship of mortality for people currently infected.

It looks like good work and they posted their code and data on GitHub.


@article {Riou2020.03.04.20031104,
author = {Riou, Julien and Hauser, Anthony and Counotte, Michel J and Althaus, Christian L},
title = {Adjusted age-specific case fatality ratio during the COVID-19 epidemic in Hubei, China, January and February 2020},
elocation-id = {2020.03.04.20031104},
year = {2020},
doi = {10.1101/2020.03.04.20031104},
publisher = {Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press},
abstract = {The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) epidemic that originated in Wuhan, China has spread to more than 60 countries. We estimated the age-specific case fatality ratio (CFR) by fitting a transmission model to data from China, accounting for underreporting of cases and the time delay to death. Overall CFR among all infections was 1.6% (1.4-1.8%) and increased considerably for the elderly, highlighting the expected burden for populations with further expansion of the COVID-19 epidemic around the globe.},
URL = {https://www.medrxiv.org/content/early/2020/03/06/2020.03.04.20031104},
eprint = {https://www.medrxiv.org/content/early/2020/03/06/2020.03.04.20031104.full.pdf},
journal = {medRxiv}
}

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