COVID-19-infected cases in Thailand during the Omicron wave using the capture-recapture method
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Abstract
Thailand is among many countries, severely affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. In December 2021, the Thai Ministry of Public Health announced the discovery of the first imported case of the Omicron variant, and the local transmission of the Omicron variant was confirmed. The Omicron variant spread rapidly but was less dangerous than the Delta. Some patients experienced mild or no symptoms and self-treated without requiring medical assistance. Lower fatality rates during the Omicron outbreak were reported compared with previous variants. Information concerning hidden COVID-19-infected patients is beneficial and will lead to a better understanding of the disease outbreak mechanism. This study proposed the lower bound estimator under the capture-recapture (CR) method to estimate the true value of COVID-19 infections in Thailand during the Omicron wave. The Chao lower bound estimator for the Poisson mixture model was created to take into account the fact that populations can be different based on how cases and deaths have been spread out over time. The approximate variance of the estimator was constructed for a confidence interval of 95%, focusing on the ratio of total estimated infected cases to observed cases in March 2022. The average ratio was 2.99 (95% CI: 2.96 to 3.01), suggesting that for every 100 observed patients, at least 199 infected patients were underreported.
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