@CoronaSurveys: Monitoring COVID-19 incidence via open polls

Click here for the link to our survey

Motivation

The world is suffering from a pandemic called COVID-19, caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus. National governments can face challenges in evaluating the reach of the epidemic, since they have limited resources and tests at their disposal. Hence, any means to evaluate the number of persons with symptoms compatible with COVID-19 with reasonable level of accuracy is useful.

Objective

The objective of this study is the collection and publication of data about the number of people showing symptoms compatible with COVID-19 in different countries. Our hope is that this data will be useful to estimate the number of infected persons with the COVID-19 virus at a given point in time in a given country, and then track the evolution of this number over time.

How you can help

Please complete one of our surveys!! Choose your country of residence and tell us about the number of cases (suspected or confirmed) you know about. No personal information is stored in these surveys. Because each of us can provide information about the situation among our direct contacts, in aggregate we are able to get rough estimates of total cases.

Because we are tracking the evolution of this epidemic over time, once you have completed the survey, please remember to come back and update the survey every day. And finally, you can help us by asking your friends, colleagues and relatives to complete the survey as well! Thank you!

You can find the latest information, results, and links to the surveys in http://coronasurveys.org

Methodology

The study will periodically issue open surveys in different countries to which any person can answer. In these surveys we will ask every participant to report how many people he/she knows that have shown symptoms compatible with a COVID-19 infection. We will additionally ask for other indirect data, like the number of people he/she knows. We will not ask for any private information of any participant in the poll. The data is collected anonymously and cannot be backtraced to the participant in the poll.

The data collected will be cleaned and processed in order to provide estimates of the number of persons with symptoms compatible with COVID-19 in the different countries, and its evolution over time. While these estimates are not expected to be fully accurate, they will hopefully be in the same order of magnitude as the real value. The estimates will be contrasted with other estimates and any data available, to validate its accuracy

Other Methods to Estimate the Number of Cases

• Hiroshi Nishiura et al. Early Epidemiological Assessment of the Virulence of Emerging Infectious Diseases: A Case Study of an Influenza Pandemic. Plos One. August 31, 2009. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0006852

• James Gorman. The Coronavirus, by the Numbers. The New York Times, March 5th, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/05/health/coronavirus-deaths-rates.html

• Ryosuke Omori, Kenji Mizumoto, Hiroshi Nishiura. Ascertainment rate of novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in Japan. medRXid, March 10th, 2020. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.09.20033183v1

• Amy Maxmen. How much is coronavirus spreading under the radar? Nature News Explainer, March 13th, 2020. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00760-8

• Alberto Fernández. Coronavirus en España (I): Razones para Actuar con Urgencia y Contundencia. Medium, Marc h 15th, 2020. https://medium.com/@albertofffernandez/coronavirus-en-espa%C3%B1a-i-razones-para-actuar-con-urgencia-y-contundencia-bba8eafa12f

• Timothy W Russell et al. Using a delay-adjusted case fatality ratio to estimate under-reporting. CMMID Repository, March 22nd, 2020. https://cmmid.github.io/topics/covid19/severity/global_cfr_estimates.html

• Antonio J. Durán. ¿Cómo estimar el número de infectados reales por covid-19? Los casos de Andalucía e Italia. Blog IMUS, March 23rd, 2020. http://institucional.us.es/blogimus/2020/03/como-estimar-el-numero-de-infectados-reales-por-covid-19-el-caso-de-andalucia-e-italia/

• Kiko Llaneras. Los números del coronavirus: ¿Cuántos infectados hay realmente en España? El País, March 28th, 2020. https://elpais.com/politica/2020/03/24/actualidad/1585077503_994849.html

• Flaxman et al. Estimating the number of infections and the impact of nonpharmaceutical interventions on COVID-19 in 11 European countries. March 30th, 2020. https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/sph/ide/gida-fellowships/Imperial-College-COVID19-Europe-estimates-and-NPI-impact-30-03-2020.pdf

Research Team

See https://coronasurveys.org/team/

Data Availability and License

All the data collected via our surveys is available (here)[https://github.com/GCGImdea/coronasurveys/tree/master/data/aggregate].

The estimates we compute from the surveys and using other indirect methods are available (here)[https://github.com/GCGImdea/coronasurveys/tree/master/data/PlotData].

All the data in this project is distributed under the Open Data Commons Attribution License.

See Also

In the news:

• ABC, Spain (April 9th, 2020): https://www.abc.es/ciencia/abci-pregunta-millon-cuantos-infectados-coronavirus-espana-y-dato-importante-202004090209_noticia.html?ref=https%3A%2F%2Ft.co%2FTcYXnIrWXN%3Famp%3D1

• ABC, Spain (April 7th, 2020): https://www.abc.es/ciencia/abci-tres-metodos-matematicos-estan-salvando-vidas-frente-coronavirus-202004062243_noticia.html#vca=rrss-inducido&vmc=undefined&vso=tw&vli=undefined

• El Pitazo, Venezuela (April 7th, 2020): https://elpitazo.net/tecnologia/investigadores-independientes-usan-encuesta-online-para-estimar-alcance-de-covid-19-en-venezuela/

• madri+d, Spain (April 2nd, 2020): https://www.madrimasd.org/notiweb/noticias/un-investigador-imdea-networks-cifra-en-mas-dos-millones-los-casos-sintomaticos-actuales-covid-19-en-espana#utm_source=notiweb_newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=noti1_02apr20

• EFE, Spain (April 1st, 2020): https://www.efe.com/efe/espana/destacada/un-estudio-cifra-en-mas-de-2-millones-los-casos-covid-19-espana/10011-4210630

• EFE, Spain (April 1st, 2020): https://www.efe.com/efe/espana/efefuturo/un-estudio-cifra-en-mas-de-2-millones-los-casos-covid-19-espana/50000905-4210665?fbclid=IwAR1OHlWSJbjdM7LPDmAYMbMllTxDhrQr_hid_yR5d9Z1zZalCvjyWjti4fw

• El Pais, Spain (March 25th, 2020): https://elpais.com/politica/2020/03/24/actualidad/1585077503_994849.html

Contact

Twitter: https://twitter.com/coronasurveys

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/209076966867175/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/coronasurveys/

E-mail: [email protected]