  Samples of young type Ia supernovae have shown `early excess' emission in a
few cases. Similar excesses are predicted by some explosion and progenitor
scenarios and hence can provide important clues regarding the origin of
thermonuclear supernovae. They are however, only predicted to last up to the
first few days following explosion. It is therefore unclear whether such
scenarios are intrinsically rare or if the relatively small sample size simply
reflects the difficulty in obtaining sufficiently early detections. To that
end, we perform toy simulations covering a range of survey depths and cadences,
and investigate the efficiency with which young type Ia supernovae are
recovered. As input for our simulations, we use models that broadly cover the
range of predicted luminosities. Based on our simulations, we find that in a
typical three day cadence survey, only $\sim$10% of type Ia supernovae would be
detected early enough to rule out the presence of an excess. A two day cadence
however, should see this increase to $\sim$15%. We find comparable results from
more detailed simulations of the Zwicky Transient Facility surveys. Using the
recovery efficiencies from these detailed simulations, we investigate the
number of young type Ia supernovae expected to be discovered assuming some
fraction of the population come from scenarios producing an excess at early
times. Comparing the results of our simulations to observations, we find the
intrinsic fraction of type Ia supernovae with early flux excesses is
$\sim28^{+13}_{-11}%$%.
