Forecasting undetected COVID-19 cases in Small Island Developing States using Bayesian approach

Abstract

AbstractIn dealing with the COVID-19, the fundamental question is how many actually undetected cases are going around regarding the capabilities of current health systems to contain the virus?. Due to a large number of asymptomatic cases, most COVID-19 cases are possibly undetected. For that reason, this study aims to provide an efficient, versatile, easy to compute, and robust estimator for the number of undetected cases using Bayes theorem based on the actual COVID-19 cases. This theorem is applied to 25 Small Island Developing States (SIDS) due to SIDS vulnerability. The results in this study forecast that possibly undetected COVID-19 cases are approximately 4 times larger than the numbers of actual COVID-19 cases as observed. This finding highlights the importance of using modeling tool to get the better and comprehensive of current COVID-19 cases and to take immediately precaution approaches to mitigate the growing numbers of COVID-19 cases as well.