A new antibody study suggests that hundreds of thousands of people may have been infected with the coronavirus without developing symptoms, in Los Angeles County
Photo:
Aaron Lavinsky / Star Tribune / Getty Images
The new antibody study by the University of Southern California (USC) in Los Angeles County suggests that hundreds of thousands of people may have been infected with the coronavirus without developing symptoms, reports ABC 7.
USC investigators in April analyzed the blood of 863 Los Angeles County residents. The results were analyzed and published this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Those antibody tests examine if people had the coronavirus in the past and since then they had developed antibodies that helped fight the virus.
Experts on COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus, say that many people may be infected and unknowingly carry the virus even when asymptomatic.
The collaborative study by USC and the county Department of Public Health found that more than 4% of those analyzed had antibodies against the coronavirus.
If those results are extrapolated to the population of approximately 8 million Los Angeles County adults, that would mean that approximately 360,000 adults in Los Angeles County had at some point contracted the infection, many of them inadvertently, the researchers say. .
If it's true, that too it would mean that the county's death rate from coronavirus per person is much lower than currently calculated.
And that result is from mid-April, when the county had only about 8,000 COVID-19 cases. As of this week, Los Angeles County has reported more than 39,000 cases.
Neeraj Sood, a professor of health policy at USC, told ABC 7 that even though the spread of COVID-19 in Los Angeles County is much greater than experts thought, the results still indicate that we are still far from achieving herd immunity, where enough people have the antibodies and the virus begins to run out of new subjects to infect them.
"This is not something that is going to go away in the next month or the next two months," Sood said. "This is something that will be with us for several months or until the moment we have a vaccine, which will probably be in 18 to 24 months."
The study also found that approximately 60% of those who tested positive for antibodies were asymptomatic, showing little or no signs of infection.
