I work in healthcare and there have been multiple times where I’ve seen disease prevalance statistics that include “undiagnosed cases”. If they have not been diagnosed then where do they get those numbers from?
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There’s a whole branch of math related to counting things. What they’ve learned is if you know how many things are in “the total set”, if you count all the things in “a smaller set” you can make estimates about what the rest of “the total set” looks like. You can also use other math and different methodologies to calculate the probability that your guess is correct.
So the scientists know how many US citizens there are, roughly. And they have data on how many doctors have diagnosed a condition. They *also* have data on how many people died and the condition was discovered at autopsy, or how many people go to the doctor for something else and this condition is discovered as part of diagnosis. Those people were undiagnosed.
So they use the fancy math to look at how many “undiagnosed but caught” people are in the smaller set of “people who have been diagnosed”. Then they use the math to extrapolate. “If diagnosed and not-diagnosed numbers are this much in the smaller set, we have this % of confidence there is this many diagnosed and not-diagnosed in the larger set.”
It’s weird and hard for our brains to understand, but it works. It’s how insurance companies stay in business. But it’s also tough math, so every study that comes out has to be scrutinized to make sure their “smaller set” was measured properly and there might not be other explanations for their findings. It is NOT as simple as just grabbing a few hundred people and using the percentages directly.
Sometimes there are other factors, too. For example, “excess deaths” is a big one right now. People who work for insurance companies and other businesses that care about death are noticing very dramatic increases in “unexpected” deaths, especially among people who had COVID and recovered. One quote that goes around is an official pointing out their worst-case scenario was a 10% increase, but they saw a 40% increase. We can’t 100% say that those people died because COVID screwed them up in a way that caused them to have a heart attack much younger than expected. We can only point out this started exactly when COVID started, only seems to be affecting people who caught COVID, and is getting worse over time. We’ll have to give it 10 or 15 more years and investigate all possible options before we do anything drastic.
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