Coronavirus may be WAY more widespread in US than initially thought

One of the most interesting things that started recently was the testing of antibodies for the coronavirus.

This type of testing has the potential to tell us how widespread the coronavirus really is and could also allow us to get back to normal at a quicker rate.

If we can figure out how immunity works and we know a significant percentage of the population has the antibodies, those people can resume work much sooner than everybody else without the risk of getting very ill. 

In Los Angeles County, residents have been getting getting tested for antibodies and the results from the first large-scale study show that 2.8% to 5.6% of adults have antibodies in their blood.

This would translate to roughly 221,000 to 442,000 adults who have recovered from getting the coronavirus.

Why is that number so crazy?

Well, the county has only reported under 8,000 cases.

So this could mean that the spread of the virus is FAR more prevalent than most of us have conceived.

And if those trends remain roughly similar for the rest of the US, this means that a much larger portion of the population will potentially have immunity from the virus going forward.

This would also mean that the fatality rate is much lower than initially believed.

As some experts have pointed out, these estimates could mean that models will need to be recalibrated and public health strategies need to be reconsidered.

These results are not that surprising to some in California, as they come only three days after Stanford researchers found the virus had spread much more widely in Santa Clara County than previously thought.

That research team estimated that 2.5% to 4.2% of Santa Clara County residents had antibodies to the coronavirus even though the county had reported 1,000 cases.

So in that case, the carriers of the virus are actually estimated to be 50 to 85 times greater. That’s pretty wild.

It is still early with tracking these antibody testing results so I think we need to let the results and data come in from more than one region and from waves of tests before we arrive at conclusions.

But just be prepared for the reality that this virus may be significantly more widespread than you probably believed it was.

You might even have the antibodies yourself and not realize it.

I know from personal experience that this could happen. I have the antibodies for Zika virus meaning that I picked up the Zika virus at some point and my body fought it off but I never develop any Zika symptoms.

So you might be surprised that you could have come into contact with a potentially deadly virus and not have had any symptoms develop.

Hopefully, antibody testing will become widely available over the course of the next few months and we will have a more accurate picture of how widespread the virus is.

H/T