--- title: Half of People With Omicron Don't Know They're Infected description: A new study shows many people don’t experience COVID-19 symptoms at all, or feel only mild ones. canonical: https://time.com/6206640/covid-19-omicron-asymptomatic-infection/ author: Alice Park article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2022-08-17T16:18:54.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-10-14T09:38:33.984Z article:section: Health og:title: Half of People With Omicron Don't Know They're Infected, Study Says og:description: A small study finds that about half of vaccinated people experience no Omicron symptoms—or only mild ones og:url: https://time.com/6206640/covid-19-omicron-asymptomatic-infection/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt8ae5bc78f49f8ce6/698a34a8b3fce31ded0c98e6/GettyImages-1213398385.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 2121 og:image:height: 1193 og:image:alt: Doctor hand holding positive Coronavirus or Covid-19 rapid test og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Half of People With Omicron Don't Know They're Infected, Study Says twitter:description: A small study finds that about half of vaccinated people experience no Omicron symptoms—or only mild ones twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt8ae5bc78f49f8ce6/698a34a8b3fce31ded0c98e6/GettyImages-1213398385.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # Half of People With Omicron Don't Know They're Infected, Study Says > Sponsored content. 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Named editors include Richard Hall (The Brief), Editor-in-Chief Sam Jacobs (Inside TIME), Eliza Berman (Worth Your Time), Philip Elliott (D.C. Brief), Justin Worland (Future Proof) and Harry Booth (In the Loop). Health Matters is written by TIME's health desk. #### How do I sign up for a TIME newsletter? Go to time.com/newsletters, choose the newsletters you want and enter your email address. There is no cost and no subscription requirement. ### Sources * TIME Newsletters: [time.com/newsletters](/c/time-nl-network-2026q3/newsletters?i=f0fb0d99-faab-45c9-a093-cb33955061f3&cr=time-nl-network-2026q3-v1) ## Video: These Virus Hunters Want to Stop Future Pandemic Threats [Watch (HLS stream): These Virus Hunters Want to Stop Future Pandemic Threats](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/cuwedOEw.m3u8) (5:30)  _Published 2022-07-29. Abbot’s Pandemic Defense Coalition is the first public-private effort led by industry to bring scientists around the world together to track current and emerging pathogens. The team is collecting virus samples from all over the world, searching for mutations, and so far they managed to alert the world to several that have swept the globe—including Gamma from a lab in Brazil and Omicron from a lab in South Africa._  by [Alice Park](https://time.com/author/alice-park/)  ## Alice Park Senior Correspondent Aug 17, 2022 4:18 PM UTC  by [Alice Park](https://time.com/author/alice-park/)  ## Alice Park Senior Correspondent Aug 17, 2022 4:18 PM UTC More than half of people—56%—who are infected with the Omicron variant are not aware of their infection. That’s the conclusion of a small [study](http://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2022.27241?utm%5Fsource=For%5FThe%5FMedia&utm%5Fmedium=referral&utm%5Fcampaign=ftm%5Flinks&utm%5Fterm=081722) published on Aug. 17 in _JAMA Network Open_. It’s good news, in some ways, since it underscores the fact that Omicron tends to cause relatively mild symptoms (or no symptoms at all) in vaccinated people. The downside is that many people are likely spreading the virus unintentionally. Dr. Susan Cheng, director of the Institute for Research on Healthy Aging at the Cedars-Sinai Smidt Heart Institute, and her colleagues at the University of California, Los Angeles and Abbott Laboratories, studied 210 employees and patients at Cedars-Sinai who provided at least two blood samples for antibody testing—one before the Omicron surge and one after. The researchers analyzed them for levels of antibodies to the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Most of the people in the study were vaccinated, and the researchers measured levels of two different types of antibodies: those that the immune system made in response to the vaccines, and those that the immune system made after infection with the virus. At the start of the study, all of the volunteers had to have infection-induced antibody levels below a certain threshold, indicating they had not recently been infected with the virus. That way, any rise in antibody levels served as a proxy for an infection. The participants also filled out health surveys describing their symptoms and any COVID-19 PCR testing to determine if they had an infection during the study period. **Read More**: [_Schools Need Better Ventilation to Curb COVID-19_](https://time.com/6206343/schools-ventilation-covid-19-air-quality/) The researchers found that 56% of the people in the study who tested positive were not aware that they had been infected, either because they did not experience any symptoms of COVID-19 or felt only mild symptoms they attributed to a cold or allergies. The findings support [early data](https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0249090) from around the world suggesting that throughout the pandemic, anywhere from 25% to 40% of SARS-CoV-2 infections have been asymptomatic, which presents challenges for public-health officials trying to control the spread of the virus. “If one message comes out of our study, I hope it’s that awareness of your infection status is going to be really key to get us through this pandemic faster,” says Cheng. “Lack of awareness and lack of knowing could lead to walking around with something transmissible, and unwittingly passing the virus to a household member, neighbor, co-worker, or someone at the grocery store.” The data showed that people’s awareness of their infection status improved after at-home rapid test kits became widely available earlier in 2022\. While about 75% of people were unaware of their infection in January and February, only about 56% were by May. The fact that one out of two people infected with Omicron aren’t even aware that they have COVID-19 makes a strong case for more frequent testing. Regularly testing yourself with [at-home rapid antigen kits](https://time.com/6190401/home-covid-19-tests-experts/) is a good idea even if you don’t feel sick, since transportation, work, school, and crowded public venues—like for concerts or sports games—are all places where you can potentially get infected. Knowing your infection status, says Cheng, could become increasingly important as studies show that [people are getting infected not just once](https://time.com/6196814/covid-19-reinfections-omicron-risks/), but twice and even multiple times with Omicron subvariants. She is currently studying reinfection to better understand how many times people are getting multiple infections, and what risk factors make it more likely. “Increasing people’s awareness of their status is our goal,” she says. “Unfortunately, we have to live with this virus for some time, and if we can be more aware, then we can potentially help ourselves, our families, and our communities to curb the spread of the virus.” ## Transcript Finding a new virus or different strains of an existing one is like searching for a needle in a haystack. And when the haystack is, as big as the planet, it takes a really good microscope and a large coordinate a team. here is a scientist to dreams of the pandemics were living with like stars Cove to or covid-19. And that's where we're trying to understand what could potentially become the next pandemic in the future for the painful. Few years that we've all lived through this another pandemic. So we need to do to learn the lessons and not reinvent the wheel. After March of 2020 and wave after wave of new variants of covid-19, researchers realize they needed a better way to stay ahead of a virus that doesn't appear to be going away anytime soon, Abbott's. Pandemic defense Coalition, is the first public-private effort led by industry to bring scientist together to track current and emerging pathogens. The team is collecting virus samples from all over the world and searching for mutations so far they managed to alert the world to several that have Globe including gamma from a lab in Brazil and Omicron from a lab in South Africa. The whole process start to finish begins with a collaborator in a site that collecting samples from people who've been tested for covid and once they get a result, I want to know what strain was present in the sample after an inactivation step. We take the sample itself and remove everything else about the sample of stuff. For the nucleic acid, which is where the Genome of the material that we can use to either determine how much is there a virus, or we can use that material to the sequence and determine the coronavirus is constantly mutating, but not all of its changes are important. One of the most difficult aspects of staying ahead of the virus is figuring out which of these could become a threat to Public Health. The virus is in charge here. It's still surprising us. Abbott's. Pandemic defense Coalition is a network of experts in infectious disease, genetic sequencing, phylogenetics and epidemiology they have more than a dozen Partners. On five continents, who work to collect samples, test them, and share the data among themselves and with other public health, and political leaders around the world. Researchers say the data collected from sequencing can help them to ensure that tests for detecting the virus continue to work. So people will know when they are infected. Even with newer variance and take proper safety measures like isolating and wearing masks to buy having a network eyes in the field boots on the ground that will spot the trans. Identify the cases enable us in real time to share information, sequence, samples. And also. Rebuild diagnostic test that can then be distributed background or seen something in South Paulo are we also seeing it in Thailand? That type of information is critical to have quickly so that different countries can prepare and respond. We're building this coke capability and capacity at our partner sites around the world as it is limited and need worshipping of samples. That information is shared through the cloud, excetera, as of November 2021 Abbott's. Pandemic defense Coalition has analyzed over 1.4 million sequences from 63 different variants and it's clear they won't be done anytime soon. And silently, once we have all that amount of data, we don't have a pipeline of five, a Matic tools that can quickly identify if maybe there's just a Test for it or maybe there's something that's completely novel. And that's where diagnostic tests are really important early on. As we have Dal, you ate that and help Public Health responses accordingly. This is one of the main focuses of the Abbot pandemic defense Coalition, is to democratize the knowledge and the expertise that we've developed over the decades here, to our partners, around the world to build the next generation of virologist. A virus Hunter is an epidemiologist. I think that's critical preventing the next. 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