Key info


Date:
15 September 2020

Authors:
Oliver J. Watson, Mervat Alhaffar, Zaki Mehchy, Charles Whittaker, Zack Akil, Mazen Gharibah, Imperial College COVID-19 Response Team,  Francesco Checchi,  Neil Ferguson, Azra Ghani1, Emma Beals, Patrick Walker1, Anonymous Authors2  

1Correspondence:
a.ghani@imperial.ac.uk and patrick.walker06@imperial.ac.uk

2Anonymous Author Acknowledgements
We would also like to acknowledge the input of a dozen Syrian doctors, health officials, epidemiologists and academics who were instrumental in this analysis. They have significantly guided the study and should be considered as contributing authors but have requested to be acknowledged anonymously for security reasons.

Imperial College COVID-19 Response Team
Kylie Ainslie, Marc Baguelin, Samir Bhatt, Adhiratha Boonyasiri, Olivia Boyd, Nicholas F Brazeau, Lorenzo Cattarino, Giovanni Charles, Constanze Ciavarella, Laura V Cooper, Helen Coupland, Zulma M Cucunuba, Gina Cuomo-Dannenburg, Bimandra A Djaafara, Christl A Donnelly, Ilaria Dorigatti, Oliver D Eales, Sabine L van Elsland, Fabricia F Nascimento, Richard G FitzJohn, Seth Flaxman, Alpha Forna,, Han Fu, Katy A M Gaythorpe, William D Green, Arran Hamlet, Katharina Hauck, David Haw, Sarah Hayes, Wes Hinsley, Natsuko Imai, Benjamin Jeffrey, Robert Johnson, David Jorgensen, Edward Knock, Daniel J Laydon, John A Lees, Thomas Mellan, Swapnil Mishra, Gemma Nedjati-Gilani, Pierre Nouvellet, Lucy C Okell, Daniela Olivera, Margarita Pons-Salort, Manon Ragonnet-Cronin, Igor Siveroni, Isaac Stopard, Hayley A Thompson, H Juliette T Unwin, Robert Verity, Michaela A C Vollmer, Erik Volz, Caroline E Walters, Haowei Wang, Yuanrong Wang, Lilith K Whittles, Peter Winskill, Xiaoyue Xi

Download the full PDF for Report 31 See all reports

WHO Collaborating Centre for Infectious Disease Modelling, MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis, Abdul Latif Jameel Institute for Disease and Emergency Analytics (J-IDEA), London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, London School of Economics, Google, European Institute of Peace and the Middle East Institute.

Now published in Nature Communications; 22-04-2021. doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-22474-9 

Summary

The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in substantial mortality worldwide. However, to date, countries in the Middle East and Africa have reported substantially lower mortality rates than in Europe and the Americas. One hypothesis is that these countries have been ‘spared’, but another is that deaths have been under-ascertained (deaths that have been unreported due to any number of reasons, for instance due to limited testing capacity). However, the scale of under-ascertainment is difficult to assess with currently available data. In this analysis, we estimate the potential under-ascertainment of COVID-19 mortality in Damascus, Syria, where all-cause mortality data has been reported between 25th July and 1st August. We fit a mathematical model of COVID-19 transmission to reported COVID-19 deaths in Damascus since the beginning of the pandemic and compare the model-predicted deaths to reported excess deaths. Exploring a range of different assumptions about under-ascertainment, we estimate that only 1.25% of deaths (sensitivity range 1% - 3%) due to COVID-19 are reported in Damascus. Accounting for under-ascertainment also corroborates local reports of exceeded hospital bed capacity. To validate the epidemic dynamics inferred, we leverage community-uploaded obituary certificates as an alternative data source, which confirms extensive mortality under-ascertainment in Damascus between July and August. This level of under-ascertainment suggests that Damascus is at a much later stage in its epidemic than suggested by surveillance reports. We estimate that 4,340 (95% CI: 3,250 - 5,540) deaths due to COVID-19 in Damascus may have been missed as of 2nd September 2020. Given that Damascus is likely to have the most robust surveillance in Syria, these findings suggest that other regions of the country could have experienced similar or worse mortality rates due to COVID-19.

All software code, data, supplementary tables, analysis scripts and figures are available in an R research compendium at https://github.com/mrc-ide/syria-covid-ascertainment.

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