Ex-NYT reporter Berenson says studies show coronavirus has already spread 'far more widely' than thought

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NY antibody study estimates nearly 14 percent of residents had coronavirus

A new study estimates about 2.7 million New York residents have had COVID-19; David Lee Miller reports.

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Former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson, a leading skeptic of the lockdown strategy in response to the coronavirus pandemic, is pointing to a number of new studies that show the virus has already spread “far more widely” than experts believed just a few months ago.

“How many more antibody studies do we need before we accept that #SARSCoV2 has spread far, far more widely than anyone realized a few weeks ago?” Berenson tweeted.

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He was reacting to new studies that show the infection rate in New York and France could be significantly higher than previously thought. They find that by doing antibody tests to see how many people can fight off the virus.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo revealed Thursday that preliminary results show the statewide infection rate is 13.9 percent, which would mean around 2.7 million residents could have carried the disease. In New York City, that number was even higher, suggesting that the infection rate was as high as 21.2 percent.

Berenson has also pointed to antibody data from a high school near Paris that found that 25 percent of 651 students. He noted that there were no deaths in those affected, and just nine hospitalized.

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That’s on top of studies in Santa Clara County and Los Angeles County in California that found infection rates higher than what experts had expected. The New York Times, Berenson's former outlet, reported that "the estimates of the number of people infected in those counties were far higher than the number of confirmed cases."

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On a later podcast, Berenson spelled out why the antibody test results are so important.

“This is a crucial point as we try and figure out how dangerous the coronavirus really is," he said. "If one million have gotten the virus and 20,000 have died, then the virus has a fatality rate of two percent, which is a very concerning number. If 100 million people have got the coronavirus, and 20,000 people have died, then the rate is 0.02 percent, it’s 1/100th of the earlier rate and that would be less than the flu.”

He said that so far it seems like the coronavirus rate is in the middle. While the flu has a fatality rate of 1 in 1000 (0.1 percent), he says so far coronavirus fatality rate is around two in 1000 (0.2 percent) and maybe as high as four in 1000 (0.4 percent.)

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He argued that while the virus is still dangerous, he says that it chips away at the narrative that led to the lockdown strategy in the first place.

“Just that all of this together begins to paint a picture, not that the coronavirus isn’t dangerous, not that it can’t kill a number of people – certainly people who are elderly or who have severe comorbidities or much higher risk – but that the figures that led to the panic, the public health panic, the media panic...don’t appear to be holding up as we get a lot more evidence in.”

Fox News' Greg Norman contributed to this report.