Title: Estimating the True Extent of SARS-CoV-2 Spread Throughout the United States and Development of a Metric to Assess Effectiveness of People’s Personal Protective Measures

Abstract:

The U.S. government lacks a coherent plan to measure the spread of SARS-CoV-2, the causative agent of coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19). Understanding the true spread of the disease is critical to making effective policy decisions to end the pandemic and return the U.S. to normal activity. While testing data is highly skewed, we can use COVID-19 caused or related deaths as a proxy for measuring the actual spread of the disease. This paper details the process by which that data is used to estimate the true extent of SARS-CoV-2 spread in the U.S. and shows that the true extent of the disease is approximately 10-fold greater than testing data. In conjunctions with this data, this study generated a model for using Google Community Mobility Report data to estimate the effectiveness of personal protectives measures on a state-by-state basis in stemming the spread of COVID-19 disease. This novel measure is a start in using complementary data sources to improve on the predictive power of traditional susceptible-exposed-infectious-recovered epidemiological models by developing a method to assess the impact of changes in people’s personal protective actions in response to the pandemic as it unfolds.