TUESDAY, June 23, 2020 (HealthDay News) — An estimated 8.7 million Americans are believed to have been infected with the new coronavirus in March, but more than 80% were never diagnosed, researchers report.<\/p>\n
They examined U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention<\/a> data on people with flu-like<\/a> illnesses who were seen by doctors or at clinics but not diagnosed with coronavirus, the flu<\/a> or any other viruses<\/a> that typically circulate in winter, CNN<\/i> reported.<\/p>\n There was a huge surge in such cases in March, according to the study published June 22 in the journal Science Translational Medicine<\/i>.<\/p>\n Only 100,000 cases of the new coronavirus were officially reported in March, and the total number of cases reported in the United States was only 2.3 million as of Monday.<\/p>\n “We found a clear, anomalous surge in influenza<\/a>-like illness [ILI] outpatients during the COVID-19<\/a> epidemic that correlated with the progression of the epidemic in multiple states across the U.S.,” Justin Silverman, of Penn State University, and colleagues wrote, CNN<\/i> reported.<\/p>\n “The surge of non-influenza<\/a> ILI outpatients was much larger than the number of confirmed cases in each state, providing evidence of large numbers of probable symptomatic COVID-19<\/a> cases that remained undetected,” they noted.<\/p>\n <\/p><\/div>\n![\"MedicalNews\"](\"https:\/\/images.medicinenet.com\/images\/HealthDay\/healthday.png\")
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