A study from Stanford University has found that the number of people infected with the novel coronavirus maybe significantly higher than what was originally anticipated.
Researchers analysed samples of 3,300 residents of California’s Santa Clara county and discovered that the virus was 50 to 85 times more common than what the official numbers had suggested, The Guardian reported. The study, which was made available to the public on Friday, is yet to be peer reviewed.
If the lockdown, imposed to limit the spread of Covid-19, is to be relaxed, health authorities need to ascertain how many people have contracted the infection. Extensive studies about the pervasiveness of the virus in a region could offer key insights, researchers said.
The study is the first wide-ranging of its kind and was undertaken by identifying antibodies in healthy persons by using a finger prick test. The test would show if the person had already contracted and recovered from the virus.
“This has implications for learning how far we are in the course of the epidemic,” Eran Bendavid, the associate professor of medicine at Stanford University who led the study told The Guardian.
“It has implications for epidemic models that are being used to design policies and estimate what it means for our healthcare system,” he added.
When the study was conducted, Santa Clara county had over 1,000 Covid-19 cases, including 50 deaths. However, given the rate of people having antibodies, it is probable that 48,000 to 81,000 people may have been infected in the area by early April itself – a number that is around 50 to 80 times greater, the report added.
While the findings have raised concerns over the potency of the virus, it also suggests that the novel coronavirus is less lethal to the over population, that what was thought.
The study, many say, could indicate that we are inching closer towards herd immunity – the concept that if adequate people in a population have developed antibodies to an illness, then that population becomes immune – than what was thought.
This would make it easier for a few individuals to resume work more quickly, a plan currently being employed in Sweden. However, the researchers who conducted the study have asked the world community to not draw any immediate conclusions till further research has been carried out.
“The idea this would be a passport to going safely back to work and getting us up and running has two constraints: we do not know if antibodies protect you and for how long, and a very small percentage of the population even has antibodies,” Arthur Reingold, an epidemiology professor at UC Berkeley, who was not involved in the study, told The Guardian.
It is pertinent to note that even after taking into account the adjusted rate of infection as discovered by the study, just 3% of the population has contracted the novel coronavirus –implying that 97% does not.
To attain herd immunity, 50% or more people in a population would need to have contracted the virus, and be cured of it, the report added.
It is further not clear whether a study, undertaken exclusively on individuals of a county in California, is representative of the United States, researchers said.
But experts, including Jayanta Bhattacharya, a professor at Stanford and author on the study, note that it is absolutely critical that similar studies be done across the country.
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