“More than one in every two people who were infected with Omicron didn’t know they had it,” according to a new study.

A new study from Cedars-Sinai researchers found that most people who were likely infected with the COVID-19-causing Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2 didn’t know they had the virus. The study results were published in the online journal JAMA Network Open.

According to Susan Cheng, corresponding author of the study, “more than one in every two people who were infected with Omicron didn’t know they had it.”

According to earlier research, at least 25% and perhaps even 80% of those infected with SARS-CoV-2 may not exhibit any symptoms. The Omicron type of SARS-CoV-2 is often associated with less severe symptoms, which may include fatigue, a cough, a headache, a sore throat, or a runny nose.

Sandy Y. Joung, MHDS, a researcher at Cedars-Sinai and the study’s first author, remarked that the findings “add to evidence that undiagnosed infections can increase transmission of the virus.”

In order to study the consequences of COVID-19 and the efficacy of vaccines, researchers have been collecting blood samples from healthcare professionals for over two years. Sapient Bioanalytics helped with the study infrastructure and biospecimen processing in the fall of 2021, just before the omicron variant surge started. This made it possible for the researchers to add patients to the study.

Researchers found 2,479 participants who had given blood samples just before or after the Omicron spike began among the healthcare professionals and patients who had taken part in the study. Based on newly positive levels of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in their blood, the researchers determined that 210 people were likely infected with the Omicron variant.

The following step involved surveying and interviewing study participants to get current health information. Only 44% of study participants who had recently tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 antibodies were aware that they carried the virus. 56 percent of respondents said they had no recent COVID-19 infections. Only 10% of the study participants who didn’t know had any recent symptoms they thought were from cold or other types of infection.

The researchers concluded that more research with bigger samples of participants from other ethnic groups and areas is required to determine the precise causes of a lack of infection awareness.

“We hope people will read these findings and think, ‘I was just at a gathering where someone tested positive,’ or, ‘I just started to feel a little under the weather. Maybe I should get a quick test.’ The better we understand our own risks, the better we will be at protecting the health of the public as well as ourselves,” added Cheng, the Erika J. Glazer Chair in Women’s Cardiovascular Health and Population Science at Cedars-Sinai.

The potential for patterns and predictors of reinfections to provide enduring immunity to SARS-CoV-2 is another area Cheng and colleagues are researching. This knowledge may also increase awareness while assisting individuals in managing their own risk.

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