Everyone Will Likely Be Infected With Coronavirus ‘At Some Point,’ Health Official Says

You’re going to get it.

That’s what Santa Clara County Public Health Director Dr. Sara Cody said on Monday.

The California health expert was asked whether everyone will eventually be infected with the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, Cody said, “Yes, probably at some point.”

“What our shelter-in-place order does, though, is slow things down, so we spread the cases out over a long period of time, and so that we spread the number of people who are severely ill and require hospitalization over a long period of time as well,” she said.

“We’re going to be at this for a very, very long time,” Cody told radio station KGO. “I just have to keep reminding myself that this is a marathon and we have to keep ourselves nourished somehow, and we have to keep our energy good.

Cody said California responded quickly to the virus. “Taking action early gives us an advantage, gave us an advantage in slowing things down,” she said. “It has, of course, caused enormous social and economic disruption. But had we taken action later, we would still be sheltering in place, we would still be experiencing incredible economic and social disruption and we’d be having an incredible strain on our healthcare system as well.”

Cody also said the virus is everywhere.

“While we’re not out of the woods, I am cautiously optimistic that we’ve put our hospitals and healthcare partners in a better position to manage the infections that we expect will be continuing to be coming,” she said. “What I will say, is taking action early gives us an advantage, gave us an advantage, in slowing things down.”

The doctor “declined to give a timeline for when she anticipates life returning to normal, saying this is the ‘new normal’ for the foreseeable future,” KGO reported.

“Mostly, what I’m trying to do in my own home is try to get my kids used to online learning, they’re not a big fan of it, but that’s the reality at the moment. I just want to go back to our new normal, and that is that everything is uncertain,” she said.

Federal and state health officials have said that many people who have been infected show no symptoms at all.

“About half of people who have the coronavirus show no symptoms, according to data from Iceland, the Italian town of Vo, and the Diamond Princess cruise ship,” Fox News reported.

All 3,711 passengers on the Diamond Princess cruise ship were tested, 712 tested positive, and of those, 331 (46 percent) have never shown outward symptoms, according to Japan’s health agency, which has also been cited by the CDC.

“Many cases are apparently asymptomatic. This is both good and bad news, because it means the virus lethality may be lower than initially thought, but also that people can unknowingly spread the virus,” Patrick T. Dolan, a virologist at University of California, San Francisco, told Fox News.

In the small Italian town of Vò, where Italy’s first coronavirus death occurred, the entire population of 3,000 people was tested.

“We tested all residents of Vò… including those who did not have symptoms,” two Italian researchers wrote in the Guardian. The researchers were surprised to find that “a significant proportion of the population, about 3 percent, had already been infected – yet most of them were completely asymptomatic.”

“This allowed us to quarantine people before they showed signs of infection and stop the further spread of coronavirus [in Vò],” the researchers noted.

In Iceland, more than 6 percent of the country’s 365,000 residents has been tested.

“Of the 5,502 samples taken in the screening program between March 13-19, 50 tested positive for SARS-CoV-2… 66 percent of those individuals reported symptoms, such as coughing and body ache,” Kjartan Hreinn Njálsson, at the Icelandic Directorate of Health, told Fox News, adding that the other third had no symptoms.