Health

At least one in three people have had Covid.  More than 103 million Americans had the infection up to the end of last year—around four times more than official estimates suggest—and today the rate could be much higher still.

Around half the residents of some US cities have had Covid, including 52 percent of Los Angeles’s population and 48 percent of people in Chicago.

Only around 22 percent of cases have been included in the official figures, say researchers from Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health.  To arrive at a truer picture of Covid’s spread, they carried out simulations from confirmed cases to include population density and mobility.

The upper Midwest states have had the highest levels of infection, with more than 60 percent of the populations of the Dakotas, Minnesota, Wisconsin and Iowa having had Covid.  Prevalence was also high in metropolitan areas, with 42 percent infection rate in Miami, 44 percent of New Yorkers, and 52 percent of people in Los Angeles and 48 percent in Chicago.

Most of the unreported cases were mild or symptom-less, and so hadn’t been detected.  On December 31 last year, around one in 130 Americans—or 0.77 percent of the nation’s population—was contagious, and a similar rate had the infection but weren’t contagious at that time.

Using the new figures, Covid’s fatality rate falls to around 0.3 percent of people infected, suggesting it is only slightly more lethal than seasonal flu.

Although vaccines have protected the most vulnerable from suffering a severe reaction or even dying, they haven’t stopped the virus spreading, especially with the mutations that may be milder, the researchers say.  The high number of infections could also include people who have been reinfected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

(Source: Nature, 2021; doi: 10.1038/s41586-021-03914-4)

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