4 ms·
There are so many unknowns from this report that it is hard to make much from it. Some of the major questions. 1. How many people in this town ended up in hosp
by danieltillett 7y ago
There are so many unknowns from this report that it is hard to make much from it. Some of the major questions.
1. How many people in this town ended up in hospital? How many are still in the ICU and likely to die?
2. Is the population sero tested representative of the town population? Was this population sampled biased by those who had obvious symptoms being more likely to participate?
3. Are the 15% positive representative of the German population or is it skewed to the young?
4. How was the accuracy of the serology test determined? >99% is impressively accurate if true.
- netjiro 7y ago> "(anti SARS-CoV2 IgG positive, specificity of the method >.99%)" This is a misprint. They meant to say 0.99 or 99%, not .99% That means it's very reliable that any positive signal originates from covid19 antibodies, instead of from something else. That does not mean that it's 99% accurate with regards to sensitivity.
- cowmoo728 7y agoPreliminary data from China suggests that a non negligible percentage (maybe 5%) of recovered patients never produce the neutralizing antibody. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.30.20047365v1 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.30.20047365v... This would mean the antibody test alone cannot tell the full extent of community spread. There's a brief summary of antibody knowledge here. https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/what-do-antibody-tests-for-sars-cov-2-tell-us-about-immunity--67425 https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/what-do-antibody-...
- netjiro 7y ago15% positive is not representative of the total German population. This is a sample from a small town with a known cluster outbreak from a festival in mid Feb, where a significant amount of people are believed to have gotten infected.