25 February 2022

Study to assess the incidence of COVID-19 in Quebec - Updated with data from the week of February 17 to 22, 2022

CIRANO has published an update of its exploratory study to estimate the incidence of COVID-19 cases in Quebec. This update integrates the data from the sixth week of collection, which took place from February 17 to 22, 2022, with a sample of 3000 respondents representative of the Quebec population and compares them to other collection weeks.

It should be noted that this study is spread over several consecutive weeks in order to monitor the evolution of the situation. The study uses both a direct sampling strategy and an indirect sampling estimation based on the network scale-up (NSS) method. Details of the methods are available in the CIRANO 2022s-03 working paper.

 

→ Update 6th week of collection (February 17 to 22, 2022)

Highlights: 
The data collected at time 6 as well as the disruptions in the estimators during the last two weeks of collection seem to confirm that the 5th wave was on a plateau last week and that the trend in the incidence of COVID-19 cases is now downward. Both the direct sampling estimator (including self-diagnosis) and the RPA-based estimators show statistically significant decreases in cases. The six-week data set confirms that the network scale-up (NSS) method better tracks the long-term trend and that the NSS estimators are much more robust than the direct sampling strategy. In addition, the proportion of Quebec adults in isolation due to COVID-19, which had been steadily declining in all collection weeks from week 1 to week 4 (from 9% to 5.5%) and had since stabilized at around 5.5% of the adult population, declined again this week to 4.1% (a significant decrease), thus confirming the downward trend in another way. The data for week 7 will allow for longer term confirmation of this downward trend.

 

This study is conducted by a team of researchers composed of David Boisclair (HEC Montréal), Roxane Borgès Da Silva (Université de Montréal and CIRANO), Vincent Boucher (Université Laval) Nathalie de Marcellis-Warin (Polytechnique Montréal and CIRANO), Pierre-Carl Michaud (HEC and CIRANO) and Ingrid Peignier (CIRANO)