Coronavirus Testing: Undercounting COVID-19 Cases Likely

One of the biggest unknowns regarding COVID-19 is how many people get the disease, recover from it, and develop immunity without being captured in our official statistics — perhaps without showing symptoms at all. Some suggest this number could be incredibly high indeed, implying that the disease spreads quickly but has a lower-than-expected fatality rate.

We should have good answers on this soon thanks to “serology” tests, which detect whether someone has antibodies for COVID (meaning they had the virus at some point in the past even if they are not currently infected). But here I’d like to offer a quick overview of what we already know. My own guess is that while we are substantially undercounting cases, it is unlikely that more than, say, 10 percent of the population already has it. Since about two-thirds of the population need to get it to achieve “herd immunity,” that would give us a long way to go if we just lift the lockdowns and hope for the best.

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Robert VerBruggen

Robert VerBruggen is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

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One of the biggest unknowns regarding COVID-19 is how many people get the disease, recover from it, and develop immunity without being captured in our official statistics — perhaps without showing symptoms at all. Some suggest this number could be incredibly high indeed, implying that the disease spreads quickly but has a lower-than-expected fatality rate.

We should have good answers on this soon thanks to “serology” tests, which detect whether someone has antibodies for COVID (meaning they had the virus at some point in the past even if they are not currently infected). But here I’d like to offer a quick overview of what we already know. My own guess is that while we are substantially undercounting cases, it is unlikely that more than, say, 10 percent of the population already has it. Since about two-thirds of the population need to get it to achieve “herd immunity,” that would give us a long way to go if we just lift the lockdowns and hope for the best.