Estimating prevalence and incidence of HIV/AIDS in the U.S. using spreadsheet methods

The authors use a sequence of procedures, Cohort Cascade, built up from estimated progression rates for time-to-AIDS of an HIV-infected cohort to transform the currently published official U.S. AIDS Onset data (by year of diagnosis) into an estimated dataset for years 1976-1985. They then extrapolate rates based on this dataset to generate a second dataset for the years 1986-1995. For brevity’s sake, the combined output presented in this paper is an HIV stage-specific estimate of the HIV/AIDS population for the years 1976-1992. The present procedure includes the consideration of underreporting and lags in data collection.