Professor says there are up to 62,000 cases here

MORE than 62,000 people here are already likely to be carrying and capable of spreading Covid-19, an expert has estimated.

Professor of Virology at Queen’s University Belfast Dr Ultan Power and his team are studying the virus, and he told the Irish Mail on Sunday it is possible to estimate the number of carriers based on the death toll, which rose to 36 yesterday.

There is an accepted death rate of 1% for people who develop symptoms. On average, there are 17 days from the time of exposure to the time of death. There is an estimated doubling time of infection of 6.2 days – so just under three doublings in 17 days.

‘Doubling time’ refers to the length of time it takes, for example, for 1,000 cases to become 2,000, 2,000 to become 4,000 and so on. As we now know of 36 deaths, this would suggest we had 3,600 infections 17 days ago. Dr Power multiplied this by a denominator of 6.92 to estimate the doubling, giving a figure of 25,000 estimated infections in the Republic. However, there is new evidence to suggest that 60% of people show mild or no symptoms. These added to the 25,000 infections means there could be more than 62,000 capable of spreading the virus, Dr Power said.

There are currently only 2,415 confirmed cases, far lower than Dr Power’s estimate.

As we have now tightened the criteria needed to be tested for Covid-19 from one symptom to two symptoms because of a large backlog, our data will be less ‘robust’ and will leave us ‘blind’ to the actual number of carriers in the country, Dr Power said.

‘The data generated by South Korea would be a lot more robust than what is being generated in Ireland or the UK at the minute,’ he told the MoS.