Nearly 60% of US population had COVID by February

SWITZERLAND: World Health Organisation (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus on Tuesday urged countries to maintain surveillance of coronavirus infections, saying the world was “blind” to how the virus is spreading because of falling testing rates.

“As many countries reduce testing, WHO is receiving less and less information about transmission and sequencing,” WHO Director-Genera Ghebreyesus told a news conference at the UN agency’s headquarters in Geneva. “This makes us increasingly blind to patterns of transmission and evolution.”

Bill Rodriguez, chief executive of FIND, a global aid group working with WHO on expanding access to testing, said “testing rates have plummeted by 70 to 90%.”

Meanwhile, By February of this year, 58 percent of the US population — more than 190 million people — had been infected with COVID, according to an antibody survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) published Tuesday.

The figure is far higher than the 80 million officially recorded cases, with the majority of infections undiagnosed, asymptomatic or unreported.

Roughly 75 percent of people under 18 had been infected, according to a paper based on a nationally representative study of antibody levels.

– THE BANGKOK POST