Hacker News Reader

Comment by gdubs | Hacker News Reader

Stanford’s study should give us more info soon. They recently screened a decent sized group in Santa Clara County to get a sense of how widespread it is, using their newly developed finger-prick test which looks for both antigens and antibodies (whether you have it / had it and recovered). Currently the test is being prioritized for frontline healthcare workers while they work on scaling up:

https://www.stanforddaily.com/2020/04/04/stanford-researcher...

View on HN

It's been 12 days since they tested everyone. My understanding is that the results for serological tests are available right away, so I was expecting them to publish results within a few days. Any idea why they haven't yet?

Perhaps they can't get statistical significance. You'd ballpark a 0.5% infection rate in the Bay Area going by deaths and current best guesses for IFR. Your false positive rate might exceed that.

These tests are better done in highly infected areas like NYC.

> current best guesses for IFR

The entire point of the study is that we don't have good estimates of the IFR.

We have randomized PCR studies and ships where everyone got tested. Yes, there is error there (false negatives), but there's an upper bound to how much there can be.

They would need to collect data again now to get a better result. Otherwise the data is the same as on the day the test was made.

Probably ended up with the same specificity problem that ruined the German antibody test. It's incredibly hard to test for just a single form of Coronavirus.

Looks like it was just published today! https://medrxiv.org/cgi/content/short/2020.04.14.20062463v1

Here’s the HN submission for discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22900730

still hearing 2-4% infected rate between east coast and the Stanford testing, random tests. I think this article is suggesting it's possible a lot more people have/had it (and are hopefully immune for some unknown time) but we're just not seeing that in the general population yet.

It still feels like the general population is very underexposed to the virus :-/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com