The number of coronavirus cases in one Northern California county could be up to 85 times higher than what current numbers show, according to a new study published on medrxiv.org.
“The most important implication of these findings is that the number of infections is much greater than the reported number of cases,” the researchers wrote in their study.
“Our data imply that, by April 1 (three days prior to the end of our survey) between 48,000 and 81,000 people had been infected in Santa Clara County. The reported number of confirmed positive cases in the county on April 1 was 956, 50-85-fold lower than the number of infections predicted by this study.”
In early April, 3,330 Facebook users from Santa Clara County were recruited by a team lead by Stanford University researchers and tested for coronavirus antibodies. They found that the likelihood of COVID-19 within the group ranged from 2.49% to 4.16%.
The researchers said learning more about unreported coronavirus cases could help them get a “better estimation of the fatality rate from COVID-19.”
Former FDA commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb saw eye to eye with those findings and tweeted that they might line up with national exposure rates.
“This probably aligns with what overall national exposure may be, on order of about 5 percent once we do wide serology,” Gottlieb tweeted on Friday.
“Santa Clara was a hot spot and I would have expected exposure to be higher. Overall we’re probably diagnosing 1 in 10 to 1 in 20 infections.”
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