Graduate student Rahul Subramanian (Ecology and Evolution), in the lab of Mercedes Pascual, was the first author on a study published on Feb. 10 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that found that during the initial wave of the COVID-19 outbreak in New York City, only between one in five and one in seven cases of the virus was symptomatic. The research team found that non-symptomatic cases substantially contribute to community transmission, making up at least 50% of the driving force of SARS-CoV-2 infection. This is the first peer-reviewed model to incorporate data about daily testing capacity and changes in testing rates over time to provide a more accurate picture of what proportion of SARS-CoV-2 infections are symptomatic in a large U.S. city.
“Without testing capacity data, it’s very difficult to estimate the difference between cases that were unreported due to a lack of testing and cases that were actually asymptomatic,” said Subramanian. “We wanted to disentangle those two things, and since New York City was one of the first cities to report the daily number of tests completed, we were able to use those numbers to estimate how many COVID-19 cases were symptomatic.”
Read the whole story by Alison Caldwell at UChicago News
https://news.uchicago.edu/story/least-50-covid-19-infections-come-people-who-arent-showing-symptoms-study-finds?utm_source=uc_newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=UChicago_News_M02_16_2021