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It’s widely accepted among experts that reported COVID-19 cases—currently around 2.6 million for the US—is a vast underestimate of the actual number of infections by the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus due to limited testing capacity. But figuring out just how much of an underestimate it is has remained elusive.
A three-person team of researchers estimates that 8.7 million Americans could have been infected with the novel coronavirus between March 8 and 28, a period during which fewer than 120,000 new cases were documented. The findings, published last week (June 22) in Science Translational Medicine, are based on an abnormal surge of flu-like illnesses reported to a federal disease surveillance network in March, which the authors attribute largely to SARS-CoV-2.
“[The study’s] estimate is plausible but on the very high end of what other models and experts say was happening at the time,” says Nicholas Reich, a biostatistician at ...
