ArticlePLoS computational biology2021
Estimating the cumulative incidence of COVID-19 in the United States using influenza surveillance, virologic testing, and mortality data: Four complementary approaches.
Article in PLoS computational biology, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 40 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
40 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Risk of infection and transmission of SARS-CoV-2 among children and adolescents in households, communities and educational settings: A systematic review and meta-analysis.Journal of global health · 2021Pooled it
- Resolving parameter uncertainty in SIR models through population-level serological surveillance: A synthetic study.Infectious Disease Modelling · 2026Article
- How Many Veteran COVID-19 Cases Were There during the Pandemic?Journal of medical virology · 2026Article
- A real-time early warning system to anticipate respiratory disease outbreaks using transfer learning.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Characterizing population-level changes in human behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Analyzing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Mortality Data Using Weekly Exceedance in Mortality Count and Weekly Change in Mortality Indicator: A Time Series Study.Health science reports · 2025Article
- Fine-grained forecasting of COVID-19 trends at the county level in the United States.NPJ digital medicine · 2025Article
- Tracking COVID-19 Infections Using Survey Data on Rapid At-Home Tests.JAMA network open · 2024Article
- Handling Missing Data in COVID-19 Incidence Estimation: Secondary Data Analysis.JMIR public health and surveillance · 2024Article
- Article
- Infectious disease surveillance needs for the United States: lessons from Covid-19.Frontiers in public health · 2024Review
- Quantitatively assessing early detection strategies for mitigating COVID-19 and future pandemics.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Quantitatively assessing early detection strategies for mitigating COVID-19 and future pandemics.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2023Article
- Asymmetry in the peak in Covid-19 daily cases and the pandemic R-parameter.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2023Article
- Accounting for assay performance when estimating the temporal dynamics in SARS-CoV-2 seroprevalence in the U.S.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Leveraging Serosurveillance and Postmortem Surveillance to Quantify the Impact of Coronavirus Disease 2019 in Africa.Clinical infectious diseases : an official publication of the Infectious Diseases Society of America · 2023Article
- Stigma, Post-traumatic Stress, and COVID-19 Vaccination Intent in Mongolia, India, and the United States.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2023Article
- Using digital traces to build prospective and real-time county-level early warning systems to anticipate COVID-19 outbreaks in the United States.Science advances · 2023Article
- Identity and COVID-19 in Canada: Gender, ethnicity, and minority status.PLOS global public health · 2023Article
- The micro-economic effects of COVID-19 containment measures: A simple model and evidence from China.PloS one · 2023Article
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Abstract
Effectively designing and evaluating public health responses to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic requires accurate estimation of the prevalence of COVID-19 across the United States (US). Equipment shortages and varying testing capabilities have however hindered the usefulness of the official reported positive COVID-19 case counts. We introduce four complementary approaches to estimate the cumulative incidence of symptomatic COVID-19 in each state in the US as well as Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia, using a combination of excess influenza-like illness reports, COVID-19 test statistics, COVID-19 mortality reports, and a spatially structured epidemic model. Instead of relying on the estimate from a single data source or method that may be biased, we provide multiple estimates, each relying on different assumptions and data sources. Across our four approaches emerges the consistent conclusion that on April 4, 2020, the estimated case count was 5 to 50 times higher than the official positive test counts across the different states. Nationally, our estimates of COVID-19 symptomatic cases as of April 4 have a likely range of 2.3 to 4.8 million, with possibly as many as 7.6 million cases, up to 25 times greater than the cumulative confirmed cases of about 311,000. Extending our methods to May 16, 2020, we estimate that cumulative symptomatic incidence ranges from 4.9 to 10.1 million, as opposed to 1.5 million positive test counts. The proposed combination of approaches may prove useful in assessing the burden of COVID-19 during resurgences in the US and other countries with comparable surveillance systems.
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