Coronavirus: over 100,000 infected in US by the time emergency was declared on March 13, study suggests

University of Notre Dame team estimates the 1,514 Covid-19 case number in America on March 12 was 1.3 per cent of the estimated actual cases

The US researchers used testing data from countries such as South Korea, Singapore and China to create mathematical modelling

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A woman walks along the Jersey City waterfront with the New York City skyline in the background in April. The White House declared the pandemic a national emergency on March 13. Photo: AP

Published: 10:00pm, 24 Aug 2020Updated: 9:08pm, 13 Oct 2020

The coronavirus may have infected more than 100,000 people in the United States by the time the White House declared a national emergency on March 13, according to a new study.

Such a large reservoir of infections, mostly under the radar of health authorities, could have severely affected the outcome of nationwide efforts to control the disease.

“[It] suggests that the United States was well past the possibility of containment by 12 March,” said the researchers led by Alex Perkins, associate professor at the University of Notre Dame, in a peer-reviewed paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States (PNAS) on Friday.

Sars-CoV-2, the virus causing Covid-19, was first isolated and fully sequenced by Chinese scientists in early January, allowing many countries, including the United States, to develop test kits. But large-scale testing was not available in the US for more than two months after the earliest reported outbreak in Wuhan because of technical blunders and administrative hurdles.

Robert Redfield, director of the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, said on Thursday that only about 10 to 20 per cent of those infected had received a test. That meant up to 60 million Americans may have had the virus by the time he made the comment.

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