(News)
In early March, the state of Washington reported just over 100 cases of coronavirus. But Seattle alone could actually have thousands of infections at that point, according to a new study, because so many diseases were instead thought to be the flu. The findings by researchers at the University of Texas at Austin mean that COVID-19 may have started spreading earlier – as late as late December in Seattle – and far more people in the U.S. are infected than official counts show, Gizmodo reports. “We can go back and share the history of this pandemic with a combination of investigative techniques and modeling,” said the study’s lead author. “This helps us understand how the pandemic is spreading so rapidly around the world and provides insight into what we can see in the coming weeks and months.”
The study looked at data from doctors and hospitals who took throat swabs from outpatients with flu-like symptoms – for January in Wuhan, China, and for late February and the first of March in Seattle. The samples were later checked again to look for the coronavirus. The team found that more than one-third of Wuhan’s patients actually had the coronavirus, and more than 10% of Seattle’s patients had it. That led to the estimate that by March 9, when no 200 coronavirus cases had been reported in Washington, Seattle already had at least 9,000, probably thousands of their children. “Even before we realized that COVID-19 was spreading, the data implied that there was at least one case of COVID-19 for every two cases of influenza,” the author said in a release. Not all assumptions of the model can be substantiated, but other researchers have reported similar findings. “We were able to reasonably determine the prevalence of COVID-19,” the author said. (Read more stories of coronavirus.)
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