This is New York.
It has a population of 19.44 million.
And more than one in five of them might have been infected with Covid-19.
New York Randomly Tested People & Found 1 in 5 People Once Had COVID-19
On 24 Apr 2020, a new testing sample in New York was shown.
Several states in America are trying to lift the lockdown restrictions and widespread testing, including for antibodies, was seen as the key to doing so.
3,000 shoppers across supermarkets in the state were randomly tested for antibodies and 14 per cent of the tests came back positive.
This means that across the state of New York, 2.6 million people were infected, then recovered from Covid-19.
In the city of New York, also known as The Big Apple, more than 1 in 5 tested positive for antibodies in the body.
The antibody tests aren’t accurate and the sample size was small, Governor Andrew Cuomo said, but if the data is valid, it shows that New York only has a fatality rate of 0.5%.
Asymptomatic Transmission
The data shown implies that in New York alone, the Covid-19 infected cases are way above New York’s 263,460 declared Covid-19 cases.
Which is why governments across the world, and the World Health Organisation (WHO), made a U-turn on their advisories about wearing masks.
People showing little to no symptoms can spread the coronavirus and worse still, for a longer period of time.
This is why the Singapore government is making as many people as possible to stay home so that the coronavirus can be kept away (as much as possible) from the truly vulnerable people in the community: the elderly and those with underlying conditions.
Then, you ask, since so many people have gotten infected and recover from it, wouldn’t it make sense to just lift the restrictions and let people get “herd immunity” on their own?
An infectious diseases specialist did say that Singapore can get herd immunity to Covid-19 but it will take two to three years.
And during these two to three years, there will be a lot of casualties as the UK has shown.