Why we wrote our recently published paper in IJCP
COVID-19 is the disease associated with the 2019 novel coronavirus Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2). The pandemic related to this virus has transformed life for billions of people across the world, with significant perturbation of the global economy.
The work that underpinned our recently published article estimating the proportion of people in the United Kingdom (UK) potentially exposed and infected with COVID-19 (1) was started in mid-April 2020, 4 weeks after the initiation of the lockdown in the UK and the United States of America (USA). Our aim was to find insights and connections from publicly available data at the level of the UK Local Authority, with drivers for the average daily infection rate RADIR (2). The literature shows that many different models are in use today with differing assumptions and various degrees of uncertainty around the estimates derived.