Saturday, May 02, 2020
Antibody Study in New York?
More than one in four people in the Bronx positive?
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A large study in New York aims to use antibody tests to find out how many people were actually infected with the coronavirus. The preliminary numbers are astonishing. Accordingly, antibodies were found in more than 25 percent of residents in the Bronx. The value is lower in richer Manhattan.
In parts of the metropolis of New York, more than every fourth person could have been infected with the new corona virus. That comes from new preliminary figures from a first antibody study presented by the state governor Andrew Cuomo.
Accordingly, in the particularly badly affected and rather poorer district of the Bronx, random samples were found in 27.6 percent of the tested antibodies. In richer Manhattan, this was the case for 17.3 percent of the samples. A total of 19.9 percent of those examined in the city of New York found the antibodies that arise after an infection with the coronavirus. For the state of New York this value was 12.3 percent of 15,000 randomly tested.
In the city of New York, which has a population of around 8.4 million, around 170,000 cases had officially tested positive by Friday, according to the governor’s figures. The study data suggests that the real number may have been around ten times that high. In the past week, around 300 people died every day in New York State from the diseases caused by the virus. In total there are more than 18,000 deaths there.
Field hospital is closed
Many researchers assume that those who have already had the Sars-CoV-2 pathogen are immune to Covid-19 for at least a certain amount of time. However, current antibody studies are at an early stage and it is unclear how accurate they are.
Meanwhile, New York is closing a corona field hospital in Central Park due to declining patient numbers. It will take about two weeks before the last patients can be discharged and the tents dismantled, said the US aid organization Samaritan’s Purse. The Christian NGO set up the makeshift hospital at the end of March to relieve the New York hospitals in the corona pandemic. 191 infected people have been treated there in the past few weeks, said Samaritan’s Purse. No new patients would be admitted from Monday.
The aid organization spoke of a “major turning point” for New York in the coronavirus crisis. Due to the falling number of cases, the hospitals are now able to cope with the treatment of patients again.
On Thursday, a US Navy hospital ship had already left the metropolis. In the end, only 182 patients were treated on the “USNS Comfort” with its 1000 hospital beds and twelve operating theaters, around 70 percent of whom were sick with Covid-19. Another makeshift hospital in a convention center in New York is also slated to close next week.
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