Antibody research indicates coronavirus may be far more widespread than known

https://abcnews.go.com/Health/antibody-research-coronavirus-widespread/story?id=70206121

By Christina Ng
and Dr. Mark Abdelmalek
April 17, 2020, 11:52 AM


A critical question in the path towards the future is how many people actually have protective novel coronavirus antibodies and possible immunity? Two research teams in California -- backed by armies of dedicated volunteers -- set out to answer this very question and the first set of results are in.

The first large-scale community test of 3,300 people in Santa Clara County found that 2.5 to 4.2% of those tested were positive for antibodies -- a number suggesting a far higher past infection rate than the official count.

Based on the initial data, researchers estimate that the range of people who may have had the virus to be between 48,000 and 81,000 in the county of 2 million -- as opposed to the approximately 1,000 in the county's official tally at the time the samples were taken.

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Dr. John Brownstein, an epidemiologist at Boston Children's Hospital and an ABC News contributor, cautioned that the results for the California county are not necessarily representative of the U.S. population and noted the use of online ads to find participants could skew the candidate pool. But, he said, the work is "adding to this confirmation of what we've expected, which is a much larger number of cases than we ever anticipated."

"There has been wide recognition that we were undercounting infections because of lack of testing or patients were asymptomatic," Brownstein said.

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