50-100x undercount? Harvard epidemiologist @michaelmina_lab thinks 🦠 more transmissible than thought: “We really don’t know if we’ve been 10-100x off. Personally, I lean more toward to 50-100 times off... suggesting much wider spread.” 🧵#COVID19 news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/…
2) He also said that additional testing for the virus is needed everywhere, and that scientists need serological tests to show how many people have been infected and recovered. “We have to get to an order-of-magnitude-understanding of how many people have actually been infected,”
3) He recommended moving people out of nursing homes if possible, and stepping up surveillance at the facilities, such as by testing employees every few days.
4) A virus that has already spread widely in the population requires a different response than one whose spread involves the cases already found through current testing, Mina said. If the virus has already infected many more people than testing to date has shown...
5) ... that would mean that the very serious cases in hospitals today are a small portion of total, and that pouring resources into contact tracing might not be the best policy. If mil of people already infected & recovered, that would mean population is on path to herd immunity.
6) On the other hand, Mina said, if current testing has captured somewhere close to true # of cases, that would mean virus is more virulent, with a sign proportion of cases becoming serious. It also means that efforts to suppress the virus through contact tracing are important.
7) “We still don’t know if this virus has infected say, 300,000 Americans or 15 million Americans,” Mina said. “And, until we really understand that difference, it’s very, very difficult to know how many people we need to be testing.” #COVID19
8) Mina cited a recent study in Iceland that tested people for active coronavirus infection and found 0.5 percent to 1 percent positive for the virus. He cautioned that the study was not a random sample — people volunteered to be tested...
9) but said if that level of the pop had active virus on the day on which they were tested, then it’s likely that past exposure is sig higher. And if those results tracked to US, that would mean mil of undiscovered cases. /end 🧵. Please follow @michaelmina_lab, a good resource.
