Data and Code for COVID-19 spread, detection, and dynamics in a megacity in Latin America

We implemented a COVID-19 sentinel surveillance study with 59,770 RT-PCR tests on mostly asymptomatic individuals and combine this data with administrative records on all detected cases to capture the spread and dynamics of the COVID-19 pandemic in Bogotá from June 2020 to early March 2021. We describe various features of the pandemic that appear to be specific to a developing-country context. We find that, by March 2021, slightly more than half of the population in Bogotá has been infected, despite only a small fraction of this population being detected. The initial buildup of immunity contributed to the containment of the pandemic in the first and second waves. We also show that the share of the population infected by March 2021 varies widely by occupation, socio-economic stratum, and location. This, in turn, has affected the dynamics of the spread with different groups being infected in the two waves.