According to a new study, more than 2 million New Yorkers got infected with COVID-19 by the end of March, which is 10 times the official count.
However, New York's data only showed about 189,000 by the end of March, which means that 1.8 million cases were undetected.
Study co-author and dean of the School of Public Health at the University at Albany David Holtgrave said that there may be many reasons why those cases weren't detected.
He said that some infected people may have not represented any symptoms or only mild ones, and never went to the doctor. Others may have wanted to get tested but couldn't have access to doctors to test them since there was a shortage of tests in February and March.
In the study, researchers took blood samples from more than 15,000 New York adults and concluded that about 14%, or 1 out of 7, had antibodies to the virus, which means that they got infected in a period of the pandemic.
Holtgrave said that even if the infection rate is 14% and higher than it was thought, it's still not high enough to opt for herd immunity.
Herd immunity is when a community has a sufficiently high proportion of people who are immune to a disease so that the disease is unlikely to spread.
The study was co-authored by officials at the New York Department of Health and posted on the pre-print server MedRXiv.org, which means it wasn’t peer-reviewed or published in a medical journal.
