Global Coronavirus infections may be six times higher than reported: Study - watsupptoday.com
Global Coronavirus infections may be six times higher than reported: Study
Posted 20 Nov 2020 02:17 PM

Image Source: The Economic Times

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Global Coronavirus infections may be six times higher than reported: Study

November 20, 2020

At a time when the world continues to reel under the Coronavirus pandemic, researchers from the Australian National University and the University of Melbourne have found that the actual number of global Coronavirus infections could be up to six times higher than the reported number of cases.

According to a modelling study, the researchers found the number of Coronavirus infection rates between March 2020 and August 2020 across 15 countries were on average 6.2 times greater than reported cases.

The data was published in a journal named Royal Society Open Science, which shows Coronavirus infection rates in the U.K, France, Belgium and Italy are much higher than reported and in the case of Italy as high as up to 17 times.

According to the data, Australia had the best level of detection among the 15 countries by the end of April, but the rate of infection may still have been five times higher than what has been officially reported at the end of August.

The study estimated the true number of infections across a combined population of over 800 million people in 11 European countries as well as Australia, Canada, South Korea and the U.S, researchers said.

"We found COVID-19 infections are much higher than confirmed cases across many countries and this has important implications for both control and the probability of infection. For example, our analysis has found more than 5.4 million in the U.K, 8 % of the population are or have been infected with the Coronavirus."

"These findings raise serious questions about how we deal with all facets of the Coronavirus pandemic, including ongoing morbidity and life long health impacts for people who have been infected, how we implement and manage lockdowns and how we make sure we are on top of this pandemic more broadly," Grafton said.

The researchers used the process "back casting" that examines Coronavirus related deaths and also compares this with the time from infection to symptoms and time from symptoms to death.

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