Estimating COVID-19 Antibody Seroprevalence in Santa Clara County, California. A re-analysis of Bendavid et al.

  1. Stephen T. Bennett
  2. Mark Steyvers

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Abstract

A recent study by Bendavid et al. claimed that the rate of infection of COVID-19 in Santa Clara county was between 2.49% and 4.16%, 50-85 times higher than the number of officially confirmed cases. The statistical methodology used in that study overestimates of rate of infection given the available data. We jointly estimate the sensitivity and specificity of the test kit along with rate of infection with a simple Bayesian model, arriving at lower estimates of the rate of COVID-19 in Santa Clara county. Re-analyzing their data, we find that the rate of infection was likely between 0.27% and 3.21%.

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    SciScore for 10.1101/2020.04.24.20078824: (What is this?)

    Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

    Table 1: Rigor

    NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.

    Table 2: Resources

    No key resources detected.

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    Results from LimitationRecognizer: An explicit section about the limitations of the techniques employed in this study was not found. We encourage authors to address study limitations.

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    Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.

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    • No protocol registration statement was detected.

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  2. Version published to 10.1101/2020.04.24.20078824v1 on medRxiv