Half of U.S. adults report being sickened with COVID-19 at some point during the pandemic, with only a fraction saying they received an official medical diagnosis of the respiratory infection, according to a new survey by the COVID States Project, led by Northeastern researchers.
Among the key findings, the survey found that self-diagnosing via at-home, or rapid, testing has far eclipsed medical testing for the virus, meaning official reporting is missing “a significant number of positive cases” at this late stage of the pandemic, researchers found. Researchers with the COVID States Project, a multi-university team focusing on issues of “computational social science, network science, public opinion polling, epidemiology, public health, communication and political science,” surveyed 26,161 people over the age of 18 between Oct. 6 and Nov. 9 to gather information on the health of Americans.
