Antibody survey reveals widespread vulnerability to COVID-19 across Canada
This translation has been automatically generated and has not been verified for accuracy.Fewer than one per cent of Canadians have had the virus that causes COVID-19, according to initial findings from the largest survey conducted to date across the country.
“What we have here is very strong evidence of widespread vulnerability. That means we can’t let our guard down,” said David Naylor, former president of the University of Toronto who chairs Canada’s immunity task force.The federally appointed task force organized the survey, which looks for the presence of antibodies that are specific to COVID-19 in the blood serum of donors. The antibodies are produced naturally by the immune system in response to infection.
The results are in close agreement with those obtained by a survey of approximately 1,700 British Columbia residents during two intervals, released last week by the B.C. Centre for Disease Control. They also show that the overall death rate due to COVID-19 is likely about 1 percent of those infected rather than the nearly 8 percent that would be indicated simply by considering confirmed cases.
Yet, as the survey shows, the lockdown and additional measures including physical distancing, face masks and isolation of suspected cases have done much to rein in the spread of the virus after the initial peak. And it means that allowing the virus to spread unchecked would have resulted in many times the number of deaths in Canada than it has caused so far, long before enough people were exposed to achieve “herd immunity”, a state in which the virus cannot longer spread indefinitely.
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