Large-scale serosurveillance of COVID-19 in Japan: Acquisition of neutralizing antibodies for Delta but not for Omicron and requirement of booster vaccination to overcome the Omicron’s outbreak

  1. Zhenxiao Ren
  2. Mitsuhiro Nishimura
  3. Lidya Handayani Tjan
  4. Koichi Furukawa
  5. Yukiya Kurahashi
  6. Silvia Sutandhio
  7. Kaito Aoki
  8. Natsumi Hasegawa
  9. Jun Arii
  10. Kenichi Uto
  11. Keiji Matsui
  12. Itsuko Sato
  13. Jun Saegusa
  14. Nonoka Godai
  15. Kohei Takeshita
  16. Masaki Yamamoto
  17. Tatsuya Nagashima
  18. Yasuko Mori

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Abstract

Continuous appearance of SARS-CoV-2 variants and mass vaccination have been intricately influencing on the COVID-19 situation. To elucidate the current status in Japan, we analyzed totally 2,000 sera in August (n = 1,000) and December (n = 1,000) 2021 collected from individuals who underwent a health check-up. The anti-N seropositive rate were 2.1% and 3.9% in August and December 2021, respectively, demonstrating a Delta variant endemic during that time; it was approximately twofold higher than the rate based on the PCR-based diagnosis. The anti-S seropositive rate was 38.7% in August and it reached 90.8% in December, in concordance with the vaccination rate in Japan. In the December cohort, 78.7% of the sera showed neutralizing activity against the Delta variant, whereas that against the Omicron was much lower at 36.6%. These analyses revealed that effective immunity against the Delta variant was established in December 2021, however, prompt three-dose vaccination is needed to overcome Omicron’s outbreak.

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  1. Version published to 10.1371/journal.pone.0266270
  2. ScreenIT

    SciScore for 10.1101/2022.01.13.22269203: (What is this?)

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

    Table 1: Rigor

    EthicsIRB: Ethics statement: The seroepidemiologic surveillance was approved by the Ethics Committee of Kobe University Graduate School of Medicine (approval code: B2156702).
    Sex as a biological variablenot detected.
    Randomizationnot detected.
    Blindingnot detected.
    Power Analysisnot detected.

    Table 2: Resources

    Antibodies
    SentencesResources
    Detection of anti-Spike antibodies by ELISA: Anti-Spike antibodies in the human sera were detected by an anti-S enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) as described in our previous study (manuscript submitted).
    Anti-Spike
    suggested: None
    The value of the area under the curve (AUC) was used to evaluate the anti-S antibody titer [21, 22].
    anti-S
    suggested: None
    The measurement of anti-N antibody was performed according to the manufacturer’s instructions, and samples with a cut-off index (COI) >1.0 were diagnosed as positive.
    anti-N
    suggested: None
    Software and Algorithms
    SentencesResources
    Statistical analysis: The Kruskal-Wallis test, Dunn’s multiple comparison test, and Mann-Whitney U-test were performed by GraphPad Prism 8 (GraphPad Software, San Diego, CA).
    GraphPad Prism
    suggested: (GraphPad Prism, RRID:SCR_002798)
    GraphPad
    suggested: (GraphPad Prism, RRID:SCR_002798)

    Results from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your data.

    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: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.

    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.

    Results from scite Reference Check: We found no unreliable references.

    About SciScore

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  3. Version published to 10.1101/2022.01.13.22269203v1 on medRxiv