People wait to receive COVID-19 test at a temporary test site at Sunset Park of Brooklyn in New York, the United States, Aug. 13, 2020. (Xinhua/Wang Ying)
The case tally in the United States does not "capture the total burden of the pandemic because testing has been primarily restricted ... due to limited test availability," researchers said.
WASHINGTON, Sept. 11 (Xinhua) -- A new study has shown that the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in the United States has been greatly undercounted due to a lack of testing, local media reported Thursday.
The case tally in the United States does not "capture the total burden of the pandemic because testing has been primarily restricted ... due to limited test availability," researchers at the School of Public Health, University of California Berkeley wrote in the report.
The research was published in the journal Nature Communications, which covers multidisciplinary natural science studies.
A medical worker takes a swab sample at a COVID-19 drive-thru testing site in Washington D.C., the United States, May 19, 2020. (Photo by Ting Shen/Xinhua)
According to the report, the United States might have experienced over 6.4 million cases by April 18, while there were only 721,245 confirmed cases counted at the time.
According to the latest statistics by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University, as of Friday, more than 6.3 million COVID-19 cases have been registered in the U.S., with 191,789 deaths.
Another report released Wednesday suggests that the United States needs to perform as many as 200 million COVID-19 tests every month till next year in order to control the pandemic, local media said.
Jade Benjamin-Chung, a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at Berkeley Public Health, said in a release published by Berkeley, "We have a large number of asymptomatic people who are affecting the total number of infections but may not be included in confirmed case counts," indicating that only testing people with moderate to severe symptoms was not enough. ■
