Underreporting COVID-19: The curious case of lower-income countries

08, September 2020 | Bangladesh

Authors:

Abstract

COVID-19 has spread across the globe with higher burden placed in Europe and North America. However, the rate of transmission has recently picked up in low- and middle-income countries, particularly in the Indian subcontinent. There is a severe underreporting bias in the existing data available from these countries mostly due to the limitation of resources and accessibility. Most studies comparing cross-country cases or fatalities could fail to account for this systematic bias and reach erroneous conclusions. This paper provides several recom- mendations on how to effectively tackle these issues regarding data quality, test coverage and case counts.