Need a cost-effective sampling strategy to estimate Covid-19 cases

It is essential yet never easy to estimate the prevalence rate of Covid-19 cases among the Indian population, mostly due to the country’s large and diverse population, and a high proportion of asymptomatic cases. Simple random sampling (SRS) or some of its variants —like stratified sampling — are suggested by many in this context.

A simple random sampling provides each individual comprising the population the same probability of inclusion in the sample. Such a sampling technique has been adopted in some European countries —  Sweden and Austria, for example — to estimate the prevalence rate of Covid-19. According to such