the staff of the Ridgewood blog
New York NY, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said in Thursdays coronavirus press briefing that tests show 21% of all New York city residents and 14% of all New York State residents have COVID 19 anti bodies
According to the New York Times , the preliminary data suggests that many more New Yorkers may have been infected than was previously believed. More than one in five people tested for virus antibodies in N.Y.C. had them.More than 21 percent of around 1,300 people in New York City who were tested for coronavirus antibodies this week were found to have them, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said on Thursday.
The results are from a state program that tested 3,000 supermarket customers across New York State. Nearly 14 percent of the tests came back positive, Mr. Cuomo said. Antibody tests are intended to signal whether a person may have built immunity to virus. They do not test for the virus itself.
But if the state’s numbers indicated the true incidence of the virus, they would mean that more than 1.7 million people in New York City, and more than 2.6 million people statewide, have already been infected.
That is far greater than the 250,000 confirmed cases of the virus itself that the state has recorded, putting the mortality rate far lower than previously thought.