Infectious Disease Underreporting Is Predicted by Country-Level Preparedness, Politics, and Pathogen Severity.

Underreporting of infectious diseases is a pervasive challenge in public health that has emerged as a central issue in characterizing the dynamics of the COVID-19 pandemic. Infectious diseases are underreported for a range of reasons, including mild or asymptomatic infections, weak public health infrastructure, and government censorship. In this study, we investigated factors associated with cross-country and cross-pathogen variation in reporting.

Challenges in reported COVID-19 data: best practices and recommendations for future epidemics.

The proliferation of composite data sources tracking the COVID-19 pandemic emphasises the need for such databases during large-scale infectious disease events as well as the potential pitfalls due to the challenges of combining disparate data sources. Multiple organisations have attempted to standardise the compilation of disparate data from multiple sources during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, each composite data source can use a different approach to compile data and address data issues with varying results.