Estimate of underreporting of COVID-19 in Brazil by Acute Respiratory Syndrome hospitalization reports

The number of COVID-19 infected people in each country is a crucial factor to determine public policies. It guides the governments to strengthen movement restrictions of people or to relieve it. The number of infected people is very important to forecast the needs of the health systems, which are collapsing in many countries. Thus, underreporting of infected people is a huge problem, since authorities do not know the real problem and act in darkness. In the present work, we discuss this subject for the Brazilian case. We take the time series of acute respiratory syndromes reported in the health public system in the last ten years and estimated the number for March/20 when the COVID-19 appeared in Brazil. Our results show a 7.7:1 rate of underreporting, meaning that the real cases in Brazil should be, at least, seven times the publicized number.