Prevalence of SARS-CoV-2 infection in the Luxembourgish population: the CON-VINCE study.

  1. Chantal J. Snoeck
  2. Michel Vaillant
  3. Tamir Abdelrahman
  4. Venkata P. Satagopam
  5. Jonathan D. Turner
  6. Katy Beaumont
  7. Clarissa P. C. Gomes
  8. Joelle Veronique Fritz
  9. Valerie E. Schröder
  10. Anne Kaysen
  11. Lukas Pavelka
  12. Lara Stute
  13. Guilherme Ramos Meyers
  14. Laure Pauly
  15. Maxime Hansen
  16. Claire Pauly
  17. Gloria A. Aguayo
  18. Magali Perquin
  19. Anne-Marie Hanff
  20. Soumyabrata Ghosh
  21. Manon Gantenbein
  22. Laetitia Huiart
  23. Markus Ollert
  24. Rejko Krüger

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Abstract

BACKGROUND: After the World Health Organization declared the outbreak of coronavirus disease to be a public health emergency of international concern on January 30, 2020, the first SARS-CoV-2 infection was detected in Luxembourg on February 29, 2020. Representative population-based data, including asymptomatic individuals for assessing the viral spread and immune response were, however, lacking worldwide. METHODS: Using a panel-based method, we implemented a representative sample of the Luxembourgish population based on age, gender and residency for testing for SARS-CoV-2 infection and antibody status in order to define prevalence irrespective of clinical symptoms. Participants were contacted via email to fill an online questionnaire before biosampling at local laboratories. All participants provided information related to clinical symptoms, epidemiology, socioeconomic and psychological assessments and underwent biosampling, rRT-PCR testing and serology for SARS-CoV-2. RESULTS: We included a total of 1862 individuals in our representative sample of the general Luxembourgish population. Of these, 5 individuals had a current positive result for infection with SARS-CoV-2 based on rRT-PCR. Four of these individuals were oligosymptomatic and one was asymptomatic. Overall we found a positive IgG antibody status in 35 individuals (1.97%), of which 11 reported to be tested positive by rRT-PCR for SARS-CoV-2 previously and showed in addition their IgG positive status also a positive status for IgA. Our data indicate a prevalence of 0.3% for active SARS-CoV-2 infection and an infection rate of 2.15% in the Luxembourgish population between 18 and 79 years of age. CONCLUSIONS: Luxembourgish residents show a low rate of acute infections after 7 weeks of confinement and present with an antibody profile indicative of a more recent immune response to SARS-CoV-2. All infected individuals were oligo- or asymptomatic. Bi-weekly follow-up visits over the next 2 months will inform about the viral spread by a- and oligosymptomatic carriers and the individual changes in the immune profile.

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  1. ScreenIT

    SciScore for 10.1101/2020.05.11.20092916: (What is this?)

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

    Table 1: Rigor

    Institutional Review Board StatementIRB: The study was approved by the national research ethics committee (Comité National d’Ethique de Recherche, CNER), under reference 202004/01, and by the Luxembourgish Ministry of Health under reference 831×6ce0d.
    RandomizationPopulation screening: The CON-VINCE study was launched on April 15, and participants randomly selected from a representative panel, which consented to the study and fulfilled the inclusion criteria, were enrolled from April 15 until May 5, 2020.
    Blindingnot detected.
    Power Analysisnot detected.
    Sex as a biological variablenot detected.

    Table 2: Resources

    Antibodies
    SentencesResources
    Additionally, serological testing for virus-specific antibodies (IgA and IgG against SARS-CoV-2) was performed.
    IgG against SARS-CoV-2
    suggested: None
    Experimental Models: Organisms/Strains
    SentencesResources
    Viral RNA from BetaCoV/Germany/BavPat1/2020 strain (Ref 026N-03889), kindly provided by the Charité-Universitätsmedizin Berlin (Corman et al., 2020) through the European Virus Archive Global platform, was used as positive control.
    Charité-Universitätsmedizin Berlin
    suggested: None
    Software and Algorithms
    SentencesResources
    Upon arrival, all pseudonymised questionnaire and clinical data is curated and mapped to associated rRT-PCR and serology data through each participant’s pseudonymised ID with corresponding sample kit ID (subject-sample-mapping) and maintained in REDCap (www.project-redcap.org), personal information was maintained separately in a proprietary secured server (SMASCH)
    REDCap
    suggested: (REDCap, RRID:SCR_003445)
    Prevalences were calculated with SAS v9.4 (SAS institute, Cary, NC, USA) except the IR and IFR where R was used with the svycipro function (Survey package) that calculates 95% confidence intervals for proportions with logit » method.
    SAS institute
    suggested: None

    Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).

    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.

    Results from TrialIdentifier: We found the following clinical trial numbers in your paper:

    IdentifierStatusTitle
    NCT04379297Active, not recruitingCOvid-19 National Survey for Assessing VIral Spread by Nonaf…
    NCT04334954Active, not recruitingSARS-COV2 Pandemic Serosurvey and Blood Sampling

    Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.

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

    Results from rtransparent:
    • Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • No protocol registration statement was detected.

    About SciScore

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  2. Version published to 10.1101/2020.05.11.20092916v1 on medRxiv