MOST OF US MAY ALREADY HAVE CORONAVIRUS -- NEW STUDY

According to a new study by researchers at Oxford University most people may already have caught the coronavirus without even realising it. The reason for this is that the symptoms for most people may be so mild as to attract no attention.

As reported by the Financial Times:

The new coronavirus may already have infected far more people in the UK than scientists had previously estimated — perhaps as much as half the population — according to modelling by researchers at the University of Oxford.

If the results are confirmed, they imply that fewer than one in a thousand of those infected with Covid-19 become ill enough to need hospital treatment, said Sunetra Gupta, professor of theoretical epidemiology, who led the study. The vast majority develop very mild symptoms or none at all.

“We need immediately to begin large-scale serological surveys — antibody testing — to assess what stage of the epidemic we are in now,” she said.

The modelling by Oxford’s Evolutionary Ecology of Infectious Disease group indicates that Covid-19 reached the UK by mid-January at the latest. Like many emerging infections, it spread invisibly for more than a month before the first transmissions within the UK were officially recorded at the end of February.

The authors of the model have questioned the British government's wholesale acceptance of the much more pessimistic findings by researchers at Imperial College London.

The research presents a very different view of the epidemic to the modelling at Imperial College London, which has strongly influenced government policy. “I am surprised that there has been such unqualified acceptance of the Imperial model,” said Prof Gupta...

But the Oxford results would mean the country had already acquired substantial herd immunity through the unrecognised spread of Covid-19 over more than two months. 

If the findings are confirmed by testing, the coronavirus crisis could soon run out of steam, meaning that most of the measures taken by governments around the world may have been superfluous.

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