New Research Says Nearly One-third Of The U.S. Population Has Been Infected With Covid-19 At The End Of Last Year

U.S. researchers have recently discovered based on model calculations that the actual number of COVID-19 infections in the U.S. far exceeds official statistics. As early as the end of 2020, nearly one-third of the population in the United States may have been infected with the COVID-19 virus.

Researchers from Columbia University in the United States recently published a paper in the online edition of the British journal Nature, saying that they used a data-driven model inference method to simulate the spread of the epidemic in the United States on a county level. In order to further verify the accuracy of the simulation results, the researchers also compared part of the data calculated by the model with the results of the serum sampling survey conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention of the United States. COVID-19 infection rate in counties.

Researchers using the model study found that by the end of 2020, the proportion of people who are susceptible to the COVID-19 virus in the United States will be approximately 69%. Susceptible people usually refer to people who lack specific immunity to certain infectious diseases and are susceptible to infection. For the COVID-19 virus, the population is generally susceptible, and people of all ages are not immune to the COVID-19 virus. After being infected with the COVID-19 virus or vaccinated with the COVID-19 vaccine, the human body will produce antibodies, and it will develop a certain degree of immunity to the COVID-19 virus. Since the United States only began to receive the COVID-19 vaccine in mid-December 2020, a 69% susceptible population ratio means that nearly one-third of the US population was infected with the COVID-19 virus at that time.

In addition, the researchers also found that the average detection rate of COVID-19 infection (the number of officially confirmed cases in the actual total number of infected cases) in the United States in 2020 is 21.8%. This means that in 2020, an estimated 78.2% of COVID-19 infection cases in the United States have not been officially confirmed and recorded.

According to statistics from Johns Hopkins University in the United States, as of the end of 2020, the cumulative number of confirmed COVID-19 cases reported in the United States is approximately 19.94 million. Based on the above detection rate, the cumulative number of COVID-19 infections in the United States at the end of last year actually reached more than 91 million.