Stanford University’s professor of medicine, Jay Bhattacharya, says that randomly testing samples of the population can and should be done immediately to give more context to the actual mortality rate of the coronavirus.
“You stress how important it is to do these tests on random sampling — samples of population in the United States,” OAN Host Liz Wheeler asked Bhattacharya Wednesday night. “How is this done in a practical sense? How is this carried out?”
“This is actually done all the time,” Bhattacharya said. “We do all kinds of population-level surveys. Polls are a good example.”
He went on to say that the tests done so far don’t accurately paint the picture of how deadly the virus is.
“The testing that we’ve done so far has focused on whether or not you have the virus actively in you. The test that we need is whether you have an antibody to the virus. The reason why that’s important is there’s a lot of people who have been infected and recovered, and if you’re just looking for the active virus, you’ll miss them.”
Bhattacharya described this fact as the “fundamental uncertainty” of the outbreak.
“We don’t know how many people have gotten the disease and were cured from it. … You need everybody in the denominator, not just the people who have the current disease.”
Bhattacharya says he is working with officials in Santa Clara County, California, to bring antibody testing to residents.
“It’s definitely possible, and it’s possible to do it, I think, relatively quickly,” he said, adding that the labs that are producing the tests are just coming online now.
Bhattacharya and a fellow Stanford researcher published an opinion piece earlier this week titled “Is the Coronavirus as Deadly as They Say?” which reiterated the need for more data to effectively judge the mortality rate of the coronavirus and determine the best ways to combat the problem.
“If the number of actual infections is much larger than the number of cases—orders of magnitude larger—then the true fatality rate is much lower as well. That’s not only plausible but likely based on what we know so far,” the piece reads before questioning whether a universal quarantine is the right way forward.
“A universal quarantine may not be worth the costs it imposes on the economy, community and individual mental and physical health. We should undertake immediate steps to evaluate the empirical basis of the current lockdowns.”
Almost 500,000 coronavirus cases have been confirmed across the globe. More than 22,000 people have died, while almost 120,000 have recovered.
