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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.

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

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.

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.