NEW STUDY CLAIMS 60,000 AUSTRALIAN COVID-19 CASES WENT UNDETECTED

Before its second wave, Australia had recorded 11,000 cases of COVID-19, but a new blood test has found the true number may have been closer to 70,000, according to a study.

Researchers at the Australian National University (ANU) developed a new "highly-sensitive" blood test that detects people's previous exposure to the novel coronavirus, Deutsche Presse-Agentur (dpa) reported.

"We screened 3,000 blood samples provided by healthy people around Australia for antibodies to the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2," Associate Professor Ian Cockburn, who co-led the research with Professor Elizabeth Gardiner, said in a statement. The researchers found that eight in 3,000 healthy people were likely to have been previously infected after accounting for false positives, which "translates to potentially around 30,000 people with the virus at that time."

The tests were conducted between June 2 and July 17, ahead of Victoria's major outbreak, and before testing had increased in response to the second wave. "Our best estimate is that around 0.28 per cent of Australians - one in 350 - had been infected with SARS-CoV-2 by that time," Cockburn said. "This suggests that instead of 11,000 cases we know about from nasal swab testing, about 70,000 people had been exposed overall." The researchers found that eight in 3,000 healthy people were likely to have been previously infected after accounting for false positives, which "translates to potentially around 30,000 people with the virus at that time." Australia has so far recorded a total of 26,738 COVID-19 cases and 816 deaths in a population of around 25 million. Victoria, the state at the centre of the country's second wave, has recorded 19,911 of those cases and 729 deaths.

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