COVID-19 Has Become “Less Prevalent” And “Isn’t Making People As Sick”, UPMC Doctor Says

As if the world needed another reason to be bullish after Friday’s jobs number surprise, one doctor from University of Pittsburgh Medical Center is doing his best to keep the rally going.

Dr. Donald Yealy, the chair of emergency medicine at UPMC, says that fewer people are testing positive for the virus and those who test positive don’t seem to be getting as sick. 

“All signs that we have available right now show that this virus is less prevalent than it was weeks ago,” he said, according to PennLive.  “Among people who test positive, the total amount of the virus the patient has is much less than in the earlier stages of the pandemic.”

He also said the proportion of those needing a ventilator has fallen. “We see all of this as evidence that COVID-19 cases are less severe than when this first started,” the doctor said.

The doctor’s sample set includes western and central Pennsylvania and other communities in New York and Maryland served by UPMC. 4% of UPMC’s 30,000 coronavirus tests it has conducted have come back positive, he said. He also said UPMC has tested about 8,000 people who had no symptoms at all, of which about 20 tested positive. 

He also said that fears about getting the virus from someone with no symptoms is unlikely.

“Your risk of getting into a car accident if you go back and forth across the turnpike in Pennsylvania is greater than your risk of being positive for asymptomatic COVID-19 infection. This should give you some reassurance that the risk of catching COVID-19 … from someone who doesn’t even know they have the infection, in our communities, is very small.”

The doctor attributes the fall in prevalence to the weather, potential genetic changes, better medical decisions and people minding their hygiene better.