Both studies exclude children and adolescents and show a strong underrepresentation of older people. However, the crowdsourced data used in this study comes with a set of limitations. Hence, digital tools such as DETECT and CDA have the potential to provide real-time complementary data to further inform policy.
If people do not follow up on a positive home test with one taken in a health care setting, they might not be captured by established surveillance systems, which could partially explain some of the observed deviations between self-reports and official statistics. Likewise, self-reported positive tests pick up at larger rates in April 2022 (US) and June 2022 (Germany) compared with the official case numbers, even though the respective peaks of the waves are still estimated around the same time points.ĭiagnostic testing for COVID-19 infections has seen a shift from polymerase chain reaction tests in health care settings toward rapid antigen testing done at home. However, we noted a stagnation of self-reported cases in the US in October 2021 and in Germany in February and March 2022 when case numbers were still on the rise.
In both studies, self-reported cases correlated well with official numbers (Pearson correlation coefficient of 0.70 for CDA and 0.75 for DETECT) and onsets and turning points of pandemic waves are well aligned ( Figure). Both studies had a similar mean (SD) participant age (49.4 years in DETECT and 48.1 years in CDA), but DETECT had a higher proportion of female participants (61.1% ) compared with CDA (35.9%% ).
0 kommentar(er)
