80% Of COVID-19 Comes From Those Who Don't Know They Are Sick

Research Finds 80% Of COVID-19 Cases Come From Those Unaware Of Infection

80% OF COVID-19 – The new coronavirus was declared as a pandemic, affecting millions of people worldwide.

80% Of COVID-19 Comes From Those Who Don't Know They Are Sick — Image from: CNBC

COVID-19 is a fast-spreading virus that caused entire nations to be on lockdown. But, how did the virus spread so fast?

Looking at countries like South Korea which had top-of-the-line medical equipment, surely, the virus could be contained with no problems.

However, the problem wasn’t the equipment, or the countermeasures imposed to prevent the spread. In South Korea, a single patient caused the majority of the cases in the country.

As such, a group of researchers conducted a study titled: “Substantial undocumented infection facilitates the rapid dissemination of novel coronavirus“.

Epidemiologists used data from China to develop a mathematical model of infectious disease spread. Furthermore, their model estimated that around 80% of confirmed cases originated from “undocumented cases”.

It could be recalled that COVID-19 could infect individuals and become asymptomatic. This meant that a person could be infected even without symptoms.

When someone experiences mild symptoms, and most of us can relate to this, we still go about our day and send the kids to school and go to work and might have a headache or slight fever and maybe take ibuprofen and go out and go shopping and whatnot.

It is that continued contact with people that allows the transmission of many respiratory viruses.
Study co-author Jeffrey Shaman, professor of environmental health at Columbia University

Based on their new study, the researchers’ mathematical model divided COVID-19 into two types: confirmed (documented cases with symptoms) and undocumented infected individuals.

Researchers calculated separate rates of transmission based on the movement of China’s residents between locations. Using this approach, the authors estimated that prior to travel restrictions on Jan. 23, 86% of all infections in China were undocumented.

Read the full research paper here.

As COVID-19 continues to spread globally, it is empirical that governments shift to focus on detecting infections says most experts.