A novel method to monitor COVID-19 fatality rate in real-time, a key metric to guide public health policy

(Nature) An accurate estimator of the real-time fatality rate is warranted to monitor the progress of ongoing epidemics, hence facilitating the policy-making process. However, most of the existing estimators fail to capture the time-varying nature of the fatality rate and are often biased in practice. A simple real-time fatality rate estimator with adjustment for reporting delays is proposed in this paper using the fused lasso technique. This approach is easy to use and can be broadly applied to public health practice as only basic epidemiological data are required.