A top Ohio health official estimates that more than 100,000 people across the state are carrying the novel coronavirus.
Ohio Department of Health Director Amy Acton announced the number of presumed infected at a Thursday press conference, according to the Hill. The number is far above the roughly 1,300 confirmed cases in the United States reported by Thursday morning.
“We know now, just the fact of community spread, says that at least 1%, at the very least, 1% of our population is carrying this virus in Ohio today,” Acton said. “We have 11.7 million people. So the math is over 100,000. So that just gives you a sense of how this virus spreads and is spreading quickly.”
“Our delay in being able to test has delayed our understanding of the spread of this,” Acton added.
Early efforts to understand the spread of the virus were constrained by the lack of test kits available to confirm diagnoses. The Trump administration was criticized for its slow rollout of testing kits despite having weeks of time to prepare for the disease.
The proliferation of test kits hit snags early. The first batch made by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were defective and could not give accurate readings. The manufacturing of the kits was slow until the Trump administration cut regulations banning labs outside of the CDC from making them.
