Estimating a Time-to-Event Distribution from Right-Truncated Data in an Epidemic: a Review of Methods

Time-to-event data are right-truncated if only individuals who have experienced the event by a certain time can be included in the sample. For example, we may be interested in estimating the distribution of time from onset of disease symptoms to death and only have data on individuals who have died. This may be the case at the beginning of an epidemic. Right truncation causes the distribution of times to event in the sample to be biased towards shorter times compared to the population distribution. We have reviewed statistical methods that deal with this bias, particularly in the context of CoVID-19.