Did You Have Coronavirus Without Knowing It?
Health experts say the virus has likely been in some U.S. communities for weeks and some people have surely had it without realizing
Follow Elemental’s ongoing coverage of the coronavirus outbreak here.
As health officials issue reports on positive test results and increasingly full ICUs, the gravity of the Covid-19 crisis is setting in. Many of these reports give the impression that the virus only recently began infecting Americans in significant numbers. But health experts say the virus has likely been in some U.S. communities for weeks, and that some people have surely had it without realizing it.
“Yes, it’s possible you may have had it and didn’t know it,” says Dr. Lee Riley, MD, chair of the division of infectious disease and vaccinology at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Public Health. The more recently you were sick, he says, the greater the odds that it could have been Covid-19. But those odds are low.
Riley explains that testing for Covid-19 did not begin in earnest until recently — just this past week, for many U.S. states and cities. “It still takes a few days for the test results to come back, and the results are usually not reported until a certain number of tests have been…
