Italy is testing at a rate less than NY. I live in NY and I personally know over a dozen people with presumed COVID-19. Only one has been tested as he is a first responder.. The others are not in the stats. I know this is anecdotal but it appears that there are WAY more people that have this than the official tested positive number.
It seems once this takes a hold in an area that it really gets a lot of people. Me and my wife also had lung congestion, cough and brief fever but will never know if we had it until widespread antibody testing occurs. But it seems very likely there are many more cases than reported and 10x could be possible.
In VA we've done 30,645 tests and have 3,645 confirmed cases. That tells me that 88% of people tested were negative. Either they're spreading a whole lot of "potentially" exposed people or there are a lot of people with symptoms who actually have something else.
Norwegian numbers are similar. Mostly only healthcare providers with symptoms, or close contacts with confirmed cases, have been tested. 95% of the tests are negative.
I'm in London and it's the same here. No-one I know who has symptoms has been tested.
Tipping the scales back the other way - the official deaths only include people dying in hospital, so the true death numbers will be a lot higher, especially places with overloaded hospitals.
There's a study in italy where they think real deaths are double the official count.
> However, journalists and scholars have crunched their own numbers. L’Eco di Bergamo, a newspaper, has obtained data from 82 localities in Italy’s Bergamo province. In March these places had 2,420 more deaths than in March 2019. Just 1,140, less than half of the increase, were attributed to covid-19. “The data is the tip of the iceberg,” Giorgio Gori, the mayor of Bergamo’s capital, told L’Eco. “Too many victims are not included in the reports because they die at home.”
It seems once this takes a hold in an area that it really gets a lot of people. Me and my wife also had lung congestion, cough and brief fever but will never know if we had it until widespread antibody testing occurs. But it seems very likely there are many more cases than reported and 10x could be possible.