Coronavirus pandemic: Nearly 6% of people in England may have had Covid-19, researchers say

Nearly 6% of individuals in England had been probably contaminated with COVID-19 in the course of the peak of the pandemic, researchers finding out the prevalence of infections mentioned on Thursday, tens of millions extra folks than have examined positive for the illness.

A complete of 313,798 folks have examined positive for COVID-19 in Britain, 270,971 of which have been in England, or simply 0.5% of the English inhabitants.

However, a research which examined greater than 100,000 folks throughout England for antibodies to the coronavirus confirmed that just about 6% of individuals had them, suggesting that 3.four million folks had beforehand contracted COVID-19 by the top of the June.

The outcomes are according to different surveys, reminiscent of these carried out by the Office for National Statistics, which counsel greater ranges of COVID-19 locally in the course of the pandemic than implied by day by day testing statistics.

Healthcare and care staff had been most definitely to have been beforehand contaminated. Prevalence of infections seemed to be be highest in London, the place 13% of individuals had antibodies, whereas minority ethnic teams had been two to a few occasions as prone to have had COVID-19 in comparison with white folks.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson had early on hailed antibody assessments as a possible game-changer in tackling the pandemic. But whereas useful for inhabitants research, scientists say the margin of error for the assessments makes them unreliable to be used on the particular person stage.

The researchers additionally cautioned that though antibody assessments had been useful for working such giant scale research, they weren’t a assure of future immunity.

“There are still many unknowns with this new virus, including the extent to which the presence of antibodies offers protection against future infections,” mentioned Graham Cooke, analysis lead at Imperial.

“Using the finger-prick tests suitable for large scale home testing has given us clearest insight yet into the spread of the virus in the country and who has been at greatest risk.”

(This story has been printed from a wire company feed with out modifications to the textual content. Only the headline has been modified.)

Follow extra tales on Facebook and Twitter