Many countries around the globe are doing their best to contain the COVID-19 Pandemic using all the resources they can utilize. Most of the time countries use number of confirmed COVID-19 cases as one of the main parameters to measure the severity of the disease within a country or a region. But does this number gives the actual number of COVID-19 infected people within a region? It’s one of the most critical questions that many are unable to find an answer. Since the SARS-Cov-2 virus can go undetected without showing any symptoms in one in five individuals who bear the virus within them, these asymptomatic Covid-19 virus infected people can act as carries of this virus who disperse the virus without even knowing that they have this deadly virus within them.
Pre-print of a study done in Santa Clara in US shows how many individuals who have been exposed to the virus goes undetected and unlisted as confirmed Covid 19 cases since they do not show any symptoms to the outside. In this particular study a group of researchers has measured the seroprevalence of COVID-19 virus antibodies in a random sample of 3300 citizens in Santa Clara.
In this study county residents had been tested for antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 using a lateral flow immunoassay. Participants had been recruited using Facebook ads targeting a representative sample of the county by demographic and geographic characteristics.
According to the results the un-adjusted prevalence of antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 in Santa Clara County has been 1.5% while the population-weighted prevalence was 2.81%. According to these percentages researchers estimate a range between 48,000 and 81,000 people infected in Santa Clara County by early April, which is 50-85-fold more than the number of confirmed cases in the area.
This study and many other observations from around the world clearly show us that this pandemic is far more scarier than what we see. The virus is clever enough to hide inside people who look completely normal and spread around easily making this pandemic one of the most difficult diseases to control.
Please note that a preprint of a research is a research publication that has not been peer-reviewed.
Readers should be aware that preprints have not been finalized by authors, may contain errors, and report info that has not yet been accepted or endorsed in any way by the scientific or medical community.
