The first case of COVID-19 in Vermont was announced on March 7.
Eleven days later we have 19. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. It’s likely we now have as many as 16 times the number of infections being reported today, most with few symptoms. That means there could be nearly 300 infected residents in Vermont right now, experts say.
The reason we don’t have more precise estimates of how many people are sick in Vermont, or anywhere else in the United States, is because we aren’t testing enough people, according to Steve Goodman, a professor of epidemiology and population health at Stanford University. “What’s happening is invisible because we only report someone as a case when we test for it,” Goodman said. “The numbers being reported are a function of how many tests we’re doing.”