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Eleven people in Indiana have now tested positive for COVID-19 and health officials say many more will likely be diagnosed.
IUPUI epidemiologist Thomas Duszynski. says the number of cases will continue to rise as more people are aware of the coronavirus and get tested.
He says that’s in part because there are healthy people who may not know they have the disease and have not yet been tested. Those people may pass the virus to someone else.
“We have community spread going on, we know that. We can expect more cases – to say is it going to double, triple, quadruple, that’s really hard to predict,” he says.
He says of the problem is we haven’t been exposed to this coronavirus before.
“The challenge is that since this is new, nobody has any immunity to it,” Duszynski says. “So then it's easily transferable from person to person and it's highly infectious at this point.”
READ MORE: What Do You Need To Know About Coronavirus? We’ve Got Answers.
He says most healthy people will recover but may expose others in high-risk groups to the virus.
“What we’re really concerned about are the older people with immunolabel compromising conditions that are at highest risk,” Duszynski says. “So, I think what we can expect are more cases, we’re just at the beginning of this.”
Duszynki says a lot is unknown about COVID-19, so it is important to be cautious.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Wednesday awarded the state more than $10 million to help respond to the coronavirus.
Contact Darian at dbenson@wfyi.org or follow her on Twitter at @helloimdarian.
This is a rapidly evolving story, and we are working hard to bring you the most up-to-date information. However, we recommend checking the websites of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or the Indiana State Department of Health for the most recent numbers of COVID-19 cases.
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