Millions of people in England have already had coronavirus, and it was ‘widespread’ from the onset of the outbreak, a study has suggested.
The results come from the largest home testing program in the world to find antibodies to the coronavirus, a study involving more than 100,000 volunteers and conducted by Imperial College London.
It suggests that as many as 3.4 million people actually had the virus – much higher than the number of 315,546 cases currently recorded by Johns Hopkins University.
‘It started in January’
The first patient to die with COVID-19 in the United Kingdom was admitted on March 5, when it was thought that there were only 90 cases in the United Kingdom.
But Helen Ward, from Imperial College London, told BBC Breakfast: “What was interesting (about the study) is that we can tell from people who reported that not only did they have a positive test, but we also asked about their symptoms, so we can actually track for most people – the 70% of people who report symptoms – when they think they were infected.
‘And it started in January, February, and in fact it started running around the country, so you can not say it started and spread in London.
“From the beginning, it was widespread.”
Conducted using a simple finger prick home test said to be easy and accurate enough for mass surveillance studies, the program suggested 6% of the UK population was already infected with COVID-19 on 13 July.
The study followed the spread of infection across England after the first peak of the pandemic, with volunteers testing themselves at home between June 20 and July 13.
Fallen distribution
People living in London were likely to be infected, along with those working in care homes and health care, people from ethnic groups black, Asian and other minorities, and people living in larger households.
The program suggested that a total of 13% of people living in London had COVID-19 antibodies, compared to less than 3% in the south west of England.
People working in nursing homes (16%) and health care (12%) returned much higher results than people who were not significant workers, at 5%.
The study found that 17% of black volunteers had antibodies, the categories Asian and “other” ethnic minorities each had 12%. The figure among white volunteers was only 5%.
People aged 18-34 showed the highest incidence of antibodies, at 8%, while over-65s had the lowest rate at just 3%.
Volunteers in the most deprived areas of the country were slightly more likely to have antibodies than those in the richest areas, at 7% compared to 5%, while those in households of more than six or seven people (12% and 13%). %) were more likely to have had COVID-19 than those in one- or two-person households (5%).
Smokers were slightly less likely to have antibodies than non-smokers – at 3% compared to 5% – meanwhile 32% of people with antibodies had shown no symptoms, a figure that increased to 49% of parents over 65 .
Public health Edward Argar hails the study as a major development in Britain’s fight against the coronavirus.
But the authors of the study warned that there was still no solid evidence that the presence of antibodies meant that humans could not be re-infected.
Coronavirus: what happened today
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