Difficult to know the number of cases of COVID-19 contamination when the PCR tests are reserved for a certain clientele, the rapid tests are not compiled and the tracing of cases has become impossible due to the excessive number of contaminations.
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According to an exploratory study by CIRANO, in which Professor Roxane Borgès Da Silva participated, there could have been more than 58,000 daily cases of COVID between January 13 and 18.
To arrive at these figures, the research team conducted surveys of 3,000 people, a representative sample of the population.
“From this data, what is called the direct sampling method, we are able to extrapolate the number of cases in the entire population”, explains Roxane Borgès Da Silva in an interview with Mario Dumont.
The question asked to those contacted: “in the last seven days including today, have you had any symptoms of COVID, a positive test, PCR or rapid test?”.
The other method used, that of network amplifier, aims to extend the compiled data to the interviewee’s entire network.
“People were asked how many people they knew who had had COVID in their surroundings, but they were also asked questions about, for example, the number of people who had not had any doses of the vaccine. Or the number of doctors they knew, the number of people in seniors’ residences, CHSLDs, RATs, etc. It allows us to know their network, to measure their network. Depending on their network and the number of people around them who have caught COVID according to them, we were able to extrapolate the number of people who had had the disease, ”explains Ms. Borgès Da Silva.
Thus, according to these two calculation methods, Quebec could have recorded an average number of cases per day of 37,409 according to the direct sampling method, and 36,000 or 33,000, according to the network amplifier method.
“If we include self-diagnosis, we arrive at 58,204 cases per day, which is enormous. That’s more than 400,000 people who would have had COVID during the week in question,” notes the researcher.
Regardless of the method and estimator used (excluding self-diagnoses), the researchers obtained an incidence that is about five times higher than the official figure.
The survey will be repeated over 4 consecutive weeks with the aim of monitoring progress.
In England such a method of calculating daily cases has been carried out to give results similar to ours.