COVID-19: The confirmed coronavirus cases might be 10 times higher than the official data
New Delhi : Now we all know that we simply have to live with coronavirus. This is virus refuses to hit pause and even if things get better there is a high risk of a second wave of coronavirus. This makes it even tougher to control this virus and reduce the spread. Containing or controlling this virus has become impossible because it happens to be a high contagious virus which has no cure or vaccine for that matter. Currently, India has 11,92915 confirmed coronavirus cases of which 4,11,133 are active and 7,53,049 have been cured or discharged. The death toll is at 28,732.
While we completely believe the official number it is important to understand that coronavirus affects people in different ways which is why the symptoms vary from person to person but at the same time, there are a large number of people who happen to be asymptomatic. Have we ever taken a pause to sit and think about how these asymptomatic carriers of COVID-19 may be spreading coronavirus without even realising it? Research says that it is possible that there may be 10 times more coronavirus cases than those that are being reported due to this. John Brownstein, an epidemiologist and professor of biomedical informatics at Harvard Medical School says that "The study is corroborating other smaller studies previously done that show that the coronavirus infection was much more widespread than we thought."
The United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that nearly 40% cases of infections come from people who don't show symptoms and the asymptomatic carriers of COVID-19 could have a major role in the community spread/transmission. This is mainly why wide-spread testing is being recommended again and again as a tool to understand the exact number. This is also why the antibodies test is being used largely to test people who might have been asymptomatic and caused community spread. Countries like Iceland have turned to mass testing in order to control and contain this virus and have been successful but there are still a lot of cases wherein there is a major error in testing. There have been a number of false-positive as well as false-negative which can't be good for anybody involved. This also might have an impact on the fatality rate. We still have a long way to go to understand this virus and discover the asymptomatic cases.
