Former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson discussed the recent spike in coronavirus cases across the southern and western United States as something that may “mean very little” in light of the actual number of people who have had the disease.
Appearing on Friday night’s “The Story” with Fox News guest host Jon Scott, Berenson explained that “many more people are infected with COVID-19 than have ever tested positive.”
“The CDC recently said it was at least 10-times the number,” he said. “There are other credible estimates out there that it might be 20 to 30-times the number.”
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“There’s definitely been community growth in the virus, in the transmission of the virus and there’s been spread in the last month,” he said. “It’s also true that basically if we tested everybody on the same day, we’d have a massive number.”
Berenson bolstered his point by citing an “amazing number out of North Carolina where they have been doing serology testing, widely, and they found that almost 15% of the people in the state had antibodies.”
“Now, that translates into a million and a half people in North Carolina recovering from the virus,” he said. “We haven’t done that on the national scale so we truly don’t know how many people have already gotten this. What I’m saying to you, what I’m saying to everyone, this rise … essentially means very little if we already know that there are hundreds of thousands of people nationally infected with this.”
While the primary statistic that should be monitored is deaths, Berenson said it’s “very reassuring” that deaths have been fairly stable in Texas, Arizona and Florida.
“Nationally, deaths have been going down and they haven’t really been going up in the trend of very large numbers,” he said. “At some point, we have to acknowledge that the virus, either doctors are treating it better or there’s a lot of people who are being hospitalized with COVID rather than from COVID.” (RELATED: Stanford’s Dr. Scott Atlas: There Is ‘No Science Behind Having Children Not Attend Schools’)
He also speculated on the possibility that the virus could be “becoming less virulent.”
Berenson, the author of “Unreported Truths about COVID-19 and Lockdowns: Part 1,” has been a longtime skeptic of the government’s measures to fight coronavirus and maintains an active Twitter account with updated information on the pandemic.