Seroprevalence of anti-SARS-CoV-2 IgG at the first epidemic peak in French Guiana, July 2020

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Abstract

While Latin America has been heavily affected by the pandemic, only a few seroprevalence studies have been conducted there during the first epidemic wave in the first half of 2020.

Methodology/Principal findings

A cross-sectional survey was performed between 15 July 2020 and 23 July 2020 among individuals who visited 4 medical laboratories or 5 health centers for routine screening or clinical management, with the exception of symptomatic suggestive cases of covid-19.

Samples were screened for the presence of anti-SARS-CoV-2 IgG directed against domain S1 of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein using the anti-SARS-CoV-2 enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) from Euroimmun.

Conclusions/Significance

The overall seroprevalence was 15.4% [9.3%-24.4%] among 480 participants, ranging from 4.0% to 25.5% across the different municipalities. The seroprevalence did not differ according to gender (p = 0.19) or age (p = 0.51). Among SARS-CoV-2 positive individuals, we found that 24.6% [11.5%-45.2%] reported symptoms consistent with COVID-19. Our findings revealed high levels of infection across the territory but a low number of resulting deaths, which can be explained by French Guiana’s young population structure.

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  1. SciScore for 10.1101/2020.09.27.20202465: (What is this?)

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

    Table 1: Rigor

    Institutional Review Board StatementConsent: Fieldworker investigators were trained to explain the project, collect informed consent and carry out the interviews.
    IACUC: The study was recorded on Clinicaltrials.gov (ID: NCT04490850) and approved by the “CPP EST-III” Ethical Research Committee (No.CPP 20.07.04-8827; N°ID-RCB 2020-A01826-33).
    Randomizationnot detected.
    Blindingnot detected.
    Power Analysisnot detected.
    Sex as a biological variableNine age-groups ([0-15 years[, [15-20[, [20-25[, [20-25[, [25-35[, [35-45[, [45-55[, [55-65[, ≥65 years) were used within males and females groups and for each age-sex subgroups, we applied an adjustment factor cijk, to have a final statistical weight wijk = (Mi/mi)*cijk, where i indexes municipalities, j indexes sex groups and k indexes age groups.

    Table 2: Resources

    No key resources detected.


    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: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:
    Our study has several limitations inherent in the study design. Our approach made it possible to obtain rapid estimates of the impact of the epidemic. However, convenience sampling may result in a lack of population representation if part of the general population has lower access to the laboratories and health centers participating in the study. In our study, we observed a significant under-representation of men and children under 15 years of age, and therefore performed a post-stratification adjustment. However, this may have led to large confidence intervals for some of parameter estimates. In addition, sample size calculation was determined to obtain a sufficient point estimate of territory-wide prevalence estimates but not to study risk factors of infection. A few municipalities with no laboratory or health centers were not represented. However, the municipalities represented by the laboratories and health centers involved in the study are home to 80% of the population, so that our estimates are likely a good reflection of the situation across the territory. We may underestimate infection levels if precarious populations are at higher risk of infection and have limited access to health facilities. Although specificity of the test used in our study is satisfactory according to our internal validation, we cannot rule out the possibility that a proportion of people infected at the beginning of the epidemic i.e. more than 3 months before our survey may have become seronegati...

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

    IdentifierStatusTitle
    NCT04490850RecruitingCOVID-19 Seroprevalence Study in French Guiana


    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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