A sampling scheme for estimating the prevalence of a pandemic.

Abstract The spread of COVID-19 makes it essential to investigate its prevalence. In such investigation research, as far as we know, the widely-used sampling methods didn’t use the information sufficiently about the numbers of the previously diagnosed cases, which provides a priori information about the true numbers of infections. This motivates us to develop a new, two-stage sampling method in this paper, which utilizes the information about the distributions of both population and diagnosed cases, to investigate the prevalence more efficiently. The global likelihood sampling, a robust and efficient sampler to draw samples from any probability density function, is used in our sampling strategy, and thus, our new method can automatically adapt to the complicated distributions of population and diagnosed cases. Moreover, the corresponding estimating method is simple, which facilitates the practical implementation. Some recommendations for practical implementation are given. Finally, several simulations and a practical example verify its efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]