38 Million Americans Have Coronavirus? CDC Says It Could Be Possible
Most Americans are still highly susceptible to the coronavirus and the actual number of cases could be ten times higher than the reported figures, according to a study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that was published in JAMA Internal Medicine.
There are currently about 3.8 million confirmed cases, and 141,000 Americans have died to date.
The research, which focused on ten U.S. cities and states, relied on data from 16,000 serological tests—blood screens that search for coronavirus antibodies and can determine whether someone was previously infected.
Diagnostic tests, on the other hand, only detect individuals who currently have the virus.
After analyzing the data, researchers saw that only a small fraction of the overall population possessed antibodies to the novel coronavirus—even in the hardest hit regions.
This means that a vast majority of people still remains highly susceptible to the contagion.
“The study rebukes the idea that current population-wide levels of acquired immunity (so-called herd immunity) will pose any substantial impediment to the propagation of SARS-CoV-2 in the U.S., at least for now,” infectious disease experts Tyler Brown and Rochelle Walensky, of Massachusetts General Hospital, wrote in an editorial accompanying the study.
“These data should also quickly dispel myths that dangerous practices like ‘COVID parties’ are either a sound or safe way to promote herd immunity.”
Herd immunity occurs when enough people become immune to a disease, often through vaccination or natural infection, to make its spread unlikely. As a result, the entire community is protected, even those who are not themselves immune, according to Harvard Medical School.
The threshold for herd immunity to the coronavirus is estimated between 60% and 70% of the population.
The researchers also stressed that it is still not confirmed whether people who recover from the coronavirus are protected or for how long.
“At present, the relationship between detectable antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 and protective immunity against future infection is not known,” the study’s authors wrote.
“Extrapolating these estimates to make assumptions about population immunity should not be done until more is known about the correlations between the presence, titer, and duration of antibodies and protection against this novel, emerging disease.”
There are now more than 14.5 million confirmed cases of coronavirus worldwide, including at least 607,000 deaths, according to the latest data from the WHO.
Ethen Kim Lieser is a Minneapolis-based Science and Tech Editor who has held posts at Google, The Korea Herald, Lincoln Journal Star, AsianWeek and Arirang TV. Follow or contact him on LinkedIn.