LONDON, Aug 13 (Reuters) - Nearly 6% of people in England
were likely infected with COVID-19 during the peak of the
pandemic, researchers studying the prevalence of infections said
on Thursday, millions more people than have tested positive for
the disease.
A total of 313,798 people have tested positive for COVID-19
in Britain, 270,971 of which have been in England, or just 0.5%
of the English population.
However, a study which tested more than 100,000 people
across England for antibodies to the coronavirus showed that
nearly 6% of people had them, suggesting that 3.4 million people
had previously contracted COVID-19 by the end of the June.
The results are consistent with other surveys, such as those
conducted by the Office for National Statistics, which suggest
higher levels of COVID-19 in the community during the pandemic
than implied by daily testing statistics.
Healthcare and care workers were most likely to have been
previously infected. Prevalence of infections appeared to be be
highest in London, where 13% of people had antibodies, while
minority ethnic groups were two to three times as likely to have
had COVID-19 compared to white people.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson had early on hailed antibody
tests as a potential game-changer in tackling the pandemic. But
while helpful for population studies, scientists say the margin
of error for the tests makes them unreliable for use at the
individual level.
The researchers also cautioned that although antibody tests
were helpful for running such large scale studies, they were not
a guarantee of future immunity.
"There are still many unknowns with this new virus,
including the extent to which the presence of antibodies offers
protection against future infections," said Graham Cooke,
research lead at Imperial.
"Using the finger-prick tests suitable for large scale home
testing has given us clearest insight yet into the spread of the
virus in the country and who has been at greatest risk."
(Reporting by Alistair Smout, editing by Estelle Shirbon)