Coronavirus Infections in US May Be Twice as High as Official Figures, Study Warns
17 MARCH 2021
When it comes to figuring out the impact the global pandemic has had on the human population, there's a big area of uncertainty: how many people have been infected with SARS-CoV-2 without realizing it?
We know that people who've caught the coronavirus don't necessarily show any signs of it – around 40 percent of cases are thought to be asymptomatic – and that puts a question mark over the official numbers that have been gathered so far.
To try and establish how many unreported infections we might have missed, researchers looked at the blood test results of 61,910 people who didn't think they'd ever caught the virus, to see if any antibodies were linked to fighting SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes the COVID-19 illness.