How widespread is coronavirus? CA study finds thousands more with antibodies than known

Thousands of more people may have had the coronavirus in one California county than previously thought, according to a new study.

Research from Stanford University shows that it’s possible that between 50 and 85 times more people in Santa Clara County may have been infected by the coronavirus by early April, researchers said.

The study used blood tests to see how many people had antibodies to SARS-CoV-2, the scientific name of the coronavirus, in their system. The prevalence of the antibodies could indicate how many people had COVID-19 in the past, researchers said.

“Under the three scenarios for test performance characteristics, the population prevalence of COVID-19 in Santa Clara ranged from 2.49% to 4.16%,” researchers said. “These prevalence estimates represent a range between 48,000 and 81,000 people infected in Santa Clara County by early April, 50-85-fold more than the number of confirmed cases.”

The research could mean that the coronavirus is more widespread than indicated by the number of confirmed cases, the study said.

There are more than 700,000 confirmed coronavirus cases in the U.S., according to data from Johns Hopkins University.

In Santa Clara County, home to Silicon Valley with a population of about 2 million, there are almost 1,900 confirmed cases, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.

“We found that there are many, many unidentified cases of people having Covid infection that were never identified with it with a virus test,” Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, one of the paper’s authors, told CNN. “It’s consistent with findings from around the world that this disease, this epidemic is further along than we thought.”