At least 4% of Costa Ricans have been infected by COVID-19. This is estimated by an analysis carried out by the Hispano-American University, which takes into account an article from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine that studies four models designed to calculate the real number of infections per country, which are also compared with the number of confirmed cases.
Estimates are made by Imperial College London (ICL), The Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), The London School of Hygiene, and The Tropical Medicine Institute (LSHTM) Youyang Gu (YYG).
These four institutions agree that true infections exceed confirmed cases but differ in their magnitude and in the changes that occur over time. These differences have sometimes varied between two and six times.
Three of these four programs are based on so-called “SEIR” models (Susceptible, Exposed, Infected, and Recovered). Some of these estimates for Costa Rica according to the measure reached until September 4th, according to calculations made by the “Imperial College of London” and by the “IHME” of the University of Washington.
In the first case, it slightly exceeds 3,500 daily cases and in the second, it is quite close to this figure. On the other hand, the calculation (in this case the median) of the LSHTM is very close to 1,500 cases. To date, confirmed cases were barely over a thousand a day.
The calculations were performed by the LSHTM, in this case, according to the median accompanied by the upper and lower confidence intervals. Between August and the beginning of September, the upper limit varies between 2,500 and 3,000 cases a day. The lower limit practically coincides with the confirmed cases.
IHME estimates
Regarding them, the average exceeds 3,000 cases for the first days of September, while the upper limit or intervals exceeds 6,000 per day. In the case of the lower limit, it reaches around 1,600 cases a day, far exceeding the number of confirmed cases, according to official sources.
“The above data support the hypothesis that the true number of COVID-19 infections in Costa Rica, in these first ten days of September, is around 100,000 to 300,000 infected with the virus. Taking an intermediate figure, enter both figures (200 thousand), one could venture that, at the moment, at least 4% of its population has already been affected by COVID-19″ the analysis indicates.
