Coronavirus: one in two people in Budapest may already be infected

In Hungary, just over 2,400 cases of coronavirus were diagnosed in one week and 3,200 in two weeks. There were very few patients in the summer compared to the diagnosis of more infections in most surrounding countries, but the data has changed in recent weeks. The spread of the virus in Hungary has started to accelerate at an unprecedented rate: Hungarians returning from abroad before starting school introduced the virus and it spread easily at home, as currently there are no substantive / strict restrictive measures, but a lot less compliance. , like before.

One of the lessons from the first period of the coronavirus epidemic was that the Hungarian epidemic occurs every 14-15. case and we have no reason to assume that the detection rate would be better now. According to chief physician János Slavik, there may have been ten to twenty times as many cases in the summer than were diagnosed, but epidemiological mathematician Gergely Röst also believes that there are at least as many undiagnosed cases now as before. Plus, he said, more cases may be left unexplored now.

As the rate of symptoms among young people is lower and the virus is spreading among them, I am afraid that our current detection rate has worsened

Röst told Portfolio. Béla Merleky, rector of SOTE, directly believes that there may be 20 times more patients than are detected.

We look at roughly how many people may be infected in the country right now if an infected person is considered an active case for two weeks. In the first case, we were optimistically assuming that the Hungarian epidemic was improving and that one in ten cases would be diagnosed, in the second that, like the first wave, one in fifteen cases would be included in the statistics, and in the third (according to Merkely’s indication) only one in twenty. patients are registered in the country.

The map below shows the percentage of residents in a given county who are currently infected if one in ten patients is diagnosed:

And the map below shows what percentage of the county’s population is currently infected if one in fifteen patients is diagnosed (similar to the first wave):

The third map is based on Merley’s assumption that only every 20 cases are diagnosed by the Hungarian epidemiologist:

According to estimates, between 0.8 and 1.6% of Budapest’s population can already be infected if every 10th or 20th case is identified.. That is, there may be 14-29 thousand infected in the capital, and throughout the country there may be 32-65 thousand in total that are coronaviruses with the previous calculation. This also means that there is a significant level of infection in the capital, specifically many may be asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic who presumably do not even suspect they are infected. Béla Merkely estimates that the number of infected people is even higher than 100,000. Based on our calculations, this can be imagined if we assume, in addition to assuming an underdetection rate of one-twentieth, that the incubation period of the disease is one week, that is, the number of officially registered infections is already lagging in comparison. with the current condition. Calculated in this way, there may be a little more than 2 carriers of the virus for every 100 people in Budapest on average.

Cover image: Getty Images