Have the majority of people had the Covid virus in their system?

According to the CDC, there have been almost 43M cases of Covid in the US. That is only about 13% of the population. Now that doesn’t count the number of people that had it and didn’t know it, nor does it account for the change in how the CDC started counting what they considered a case. But even if you doubled it (Being grossly conservative), you still are only at 26% of the population. So that is not a majority.

As far as I understand, you can’t have had the virus “in your system” unless you have had the disease.

Not to mention the people that had it twice (who are probably also in the CDC statistics).

That seems unknown, and not really answerable, at least without more studies such as new one the article describes.

@seawulf575 is correct. I will take his word for him on the numbers but it seems correct.

I don’t think we can answer this question authoritatively. This pandemic is global. It is everywhere. Many countries lack the means to accurately count infections.

We can get good information for advanced economies as noted above. That indicates the majority of people have not contracted the virus. It’s impossible to extrapolate that across the planet.

With the current information available I would say no, the majority of people have not had C19. Other coronaviruses maybe, but not C19. The US is easily less than half as stated above. Countries like Australia, many African countries, many parts of Asia controlled the virus very well. A huge number have been sick, but not the majority.

I joined a study trying to determine the coronavirus infection rate in our county. The goal is 14,000 participants, but the last I read they had 1,000 and 17% tested positive. The test can distinguish between antibodies from infection and from vaccines.