Corona Calculator: How many coronavirus cases could there be in Pakistan?

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Web Desk
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The novel coronavirus has spread rapidly in Pakistan in recent weeks, and the government has been racing to enhance testing and treatment capacities to cope with the rising number of cases.

Meanwhile, Pakistan's official tally of confirmed cases has crossed the 180,000 mark and continues to grow, but many doctors and experts believe the actual number of sick persons may be much higher and has not been truly captured yet due to limited testing.

Additionally, because most cases tend to be asymptomatic — that is, people who are sick may never know they are sick and therefore never report their illness — it adds to the difficulty of keeping track of the true number of infections at any given point in time.

Read also: CM Punjab warned 670,000 may be infected with COVID-19 in Lahore alone  

Disclaimer: The estimates provided by the calculator may not be accurate. Geo.tv does not take any responsibility for numbers generated by the calculator based on readers' input.

The above interactive model estimates how many people in total may be infected by the coronavirus in Pakistan based on the percentage of the population that is believed to be sick.

This percentage (the infection rate) can be changed by our readers to see what impact coronavirus will have as it spreads in both rural and urban areas.

Key assumptions

For the sake of this model, the population of Pakistan has been taken to be 212 million, of which 62% have been estimated to be above 18 years of age.

This demographic (18+ years) has been considered to be the population most at-risk to the threat of COVID-19. The incidence of the virus in the age group 0-18 years has been ignored for simplification purposes.

The urban/rural split of the population — that is, the percentage of the total population that lives in urban and rural areas, respectively — has been taken to be 36.4%/63.6%.

Under the model's default setting, the coronavirus infection rate is estimated to be 10% in urban areas and 3.5% in rural areas.

In other words, this model assumes that in urban areas, 1 in every 10 people is infected with the coronavirus, while in rural areas, 1 in every 30 people has the virus.

(The infection rate is taken to be higher in urban areas because people tend to live closer together and interact much more with each other than in rural areas.)

Using these assumptions gives us an estimate that there may already be more than 77 lakh 10 thousand (7.71 million) total infections in Pakistan. 

Readers are invited to change the infection rate numbers to see what impact they will have on the estimated total number of infections.

It is clarified, however, that this number is just an estimate based on several assumptions and should not be taken to be the actual number of coronavirus cases in Pakistan.