Iceland finds that half its citizens with coronavirus have shown no symptoms
Big data can come from small places.Iceland’s isolated location and sparse population mean that some vital information about the novel coronavirus is coming out of the island nation — especially considering that it’s already tested 10% of its population, which is more than any other country, according to USA Today.
And the scariest finding: At any given time, about half of its citizens who have the coronavirus — and don’t know it — are not showing any symptoms. That’s double the CDC’s recent estimate that as many as one in four people with COVID-19 may be asymptomatic.
Granted, the United States hasn’t tested such a high percentage of its population, so it’s not working with as much data. Online statistics site Worldometer crunched the number of coronavirus tests reported by each state — around 2.3 million, by its account, in total — which it equated to about 7,100 tests per 1 million people. By that same scale, it reported Iceland has performed 96,000 tests per million people. (The actual population of Iceland, long a favorite of biotech research because of its relative homogeneity and its centuries’ worth of genealogical records, is 364,134 — roughly the same as that of Tulsa, Okla.)