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This study addresses COVID-19 testing as a nonlinear sampling problem, aiming to uncover the dependence of the true infection count in the population on COVID-19 testing metrics such as testing volume and positivity rates. Employing an artificial neural network, we explore the relationship among daily confirmed case counts, testing data, population statistics, and the actual daily case count. The trained artificial neural network undergoes testing in in-sample, out-of-sample, and several hypothetical scenarios. A substantial focus of this paper lies in the estimation of the daily true case count, which serves as the output set of our training process. To achieve this, we implement a regularized backcasting technique that utilizes death counts and the infection fatality ratio (IFR), as the death statistics and serological surveys (providing the IFR) as more reliable COVID-19 data sources. Addressing the impact of factors such as age distribution, vaccination, and emerging variants on the IFR time series is a pivotal aspect of our analysis. We expect our study to enhance our understanding of the genuine implications of the COVID-19 pandemic, subsequently benefiting mitigation strategies. 

This paper studies computational methods for quasi-stationary distributions (QSDs). We first proposed a data-driven solver that solves Fokker–Planck equations for QSDs. Similar to the case of Fokker–Planck equations for invariant probability measures, we set up an optimization problem that minimizes the distance from a low-accuracy reference solution, under the constraint of satisfying the linear relation given by the discretized Fokker–Planck operator. Then we use coupling method to study the sensitivity of a QSD against either the change of boundary condition or the diffusion coefficient. The 1-Wasserstein distance between a QSD and the corresponding invariant probability measure can be quantitatively estimated. Some numerical results about both computation of QSDs and their sensitivity analysis are provided.