More than 79,000 people around the world have recovered from COVID-19, out of 182,000 confirmed cases of the disease.

The virus has caused or contributed to the deaths of over 7,000 people, while the remaining 96,000 cases are still active.

"More or less anyone can get this virus," says microbiologist Dr Simon Clarke from the University of Reading. "And the vast majority of people will have a relatively mild but unpleasant time of it.

"But those people who get it more seriously, the elderly and people with clinically morbidity, most of those will recover as well."

In the UK at least 52 people are known to have recovered from the disease, according to figures from Public Health England.


However, the true number of people who have recovered from the virus is likely to be higher.

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This is because people who experience mild symptoms, and are able to self-isolate without requiring medical assistance, are no longer being tested for the coronavirus.

As a result neither their illness nor their recovery is included in the official statistics released by authorities.

The Department of Health and Social Care are not currently collecting figures on the number of people self-isolating, or testing all suspected cases, because of resources.

This means it is impossible to say how many other people may already have had and recovered from COVID-19 in the UK.

"We don't know what the true infection rate is," says Dr Clarke.

"If we're effectively underestimating the infection rate, then we will overestimate the lethality of infections."

At the moment the total number of official recoveries in the UK is relatively small, as it takes time to recover from the disease and the vast majority of cases were only diagnosed recently.

But the figure should grow significantly over the coming weeks, as happened in China as the country began to to get the outbreak under control.

There, the number of people recovering from the disease eventually grew larger than the number of new cases, and the same should become true in other countries with time.