New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said in a release to reporters Thursday that more than 13% of New Yorkers likely had the coronavirus over the last several weeks.
Cuomo said that New York discovered the data after randomly testing 3,000 people at grocery stores and other locals across 19 counties. Citizens could have been infected as long as a month and a half ago, according to Cuomo, who called the study a “significant data set.”
“What does that mean? It means these were people who were infected and who developed the antibodies to fight the infection,” Cuomo said. “They were infected three weeks ago, four weeks ago, five weeks ago, six weeks ago, but they had the virus, they developed the antibodies and they are now recovered.”
New York health officials, meanwhile, warn that many more citizens were likely exposed. “[C]lose to a million New Yorkers” had been exposed to the coronavirus, or COVID-19, Health Commissioner Oxiris Barbot said during a press briefing Thursday with New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio by her side.
There have been at least 138,000 confirmed cases in a city of 8.3 million, Barbot said.
COVID-19’s spread could be far wider than previously thought, according to another antibody test preformed on April 17 by Stanford University researchers. The teams tested 3,300 Santa Clara County, California volunteers and found that 2.5 to 4.2% of those tested were positive for antibodies, meaning the the infection rate is likely much higher than the official account.
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