Comment by K0nserv | Hacker News Reader

Comment by K0nserv | Hacker News Reader

I'm not Norwegian(Swedish) and as far as I understand the article makes no mention of antigen tests. The article is talking about *antibodies* being found in blood tests from December 2019.

I think the title should be changed, if someone who speaks Norwegian can weigh in that'd be helpful.

This section is also interesting

    Det er også tidligere i pandemien påvist at koronaviruset sirkulerte i Italia i 2019, så tidlig som i september 2019, viser en italiensk studie fra Milano.

    Forskere har påpekt at viruset trolig også sirkulerte i kinesiske Wuhan lenge før det ble offisielt påvist. Hovedteorien er fortsatt at viruset først spredte seg der.

Translated it says roughly:

    It has also been proven, earlier in the pandemic, that COVID19 was circulating in Italy in 2019, as early as September, according to an Italian study from Milano.

    Scientist have pointed out that the virus likely circulated in Wuhan a long time before it was officially detected[påvist, unsure if this is "proven"]. The leading theory remains that the virus originated there.

See also, danielskogly's comment below.

You're correct that the article doesn't mention antigen tests, ~~but the actual study[0] does~~:

Edit: Apparantly the described test[1] is indeed for antibodies. See child comment by projektfu.

> Summary:

> We studied SARS-CoV-2 seroprevalence among pregnant women in Norway by including all women who were first trimester pregnant (n=6520), each month from December 2019 through December 2020, in the catchment region of Norway’s second largest hospital. We used sera that had been frozen stored after compulsory testing for syphilis antibodies in antenatal care. The sera were analyzed with the Elecsys® Anti-SARS-CoV-2 immunoassay (Roche Diagnostics, Cobas e801). This immunoassay detects IgG/IgM against SARS-CoV-2 nucleocapsid antigen.

[0] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/epidemiology-and-inf...

[1] https://diagnostics.roche.com/content/dam/diagnostics/Bluepr...

Thanks for digging up the primary source.

The part you cited describes an antibody test.

You're absolutely right. Updated the comment to reflect that.

dang: Please change the link to point to that study.

This is a reputable newspaper but I would be careful in taking statements like early circulation in country x or y at face value. There are literally thousands of studies looking back at such data. Even if all of them are done with 100% sound methodology some are by mere statistics bound to find a positive result. Just like you can also dig up studies finding no link between smoking and cancer we have to look at the whole picture that thousands of studies find no such prior circulation.

It was a rare disease. You can't expect a rare disease to be found often.

"supercontagious" and "rare" disease is an oxymoron

That's right, in the sense that a supercontagious disease cannot stay rare for long. For how long can is stay rare? For how many months? That's a nontrivial question for a diseases such as this, which has both superspreaders and a large number of patients that infect noone.

You are assuming that what they found is indeed a marker of covid-19. It might well be that they found antibodies for another coronavirus that for whatever reason shows on the tests used. There are many coronavira and not all very well researched. Nor is each test precise in each condition, e.g. in the paper they describe how specificity and sensitivity vary depending on the age of the sample, then calculate false positive/negative values using one of those values. Has the test been tested for pregnant women and frozen samples? Might there be other factors, e.g. cross-contamination with some equipment they use?

Its not unusual for even well-done studies to later be revealed as flawed, so its important not to take results of one single study as ultimate truth.

Actually, what I tried to say is that prior to becoming a common disease, it was a rare disease for a while, and precisely because it wasn't common, expecting it to be found often is unreasonable. Saying that a find is unlikely because most people found nothing is meaningless, because we already know that the virus wasn't common before it became common.

I looked up the test they used, and it's among the better ones.

I can't edit anymore but please also see this comment chain below:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30083921

All this fuss about THREE positive samples from December 2019, which might be false positives.

I don't put any credence in this study but I will point out that the likely origin of HIV were probed and they managed to recover HIV samples in blood from 1959. these results are now generally accepted. Note, however, it looks like at least one case was an example of sample mixups or contamination, which is common when dealign with tiny amounts of virus and amplification techniques.

nothing has been "proven" yet. the bar for proof is extremely high and requires multiple groups to replicate results with different samples. I believe the current mainstream science with large support is that COVID entered the US some time before late December and the earliest trusted samples are from China, november, with the virus entering the US before the Chinese detected it in Wuhan.

If this is correct, people having antibodies, then it would be even more interesting, imho.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com