On April 11, 2020 a preprint study by John Ioannidis and Jay Bhattacharya et al, looking at 3,300 people living in Santa Clara and revealed that 1 in 66 people already had SARS-CoV-2-specific antibodies, a rate which extraporated out to around 2 million people already being infected, when at that same time the official number is only 1000.  This translates into an IFR of 0.12-0.5-2% which is in line with the flu. [1, 2]

The sero-survey gives you a snapshot in time of who is infected in your given population.  The commercial tests can be used, which shows if a person had been infected for at least a week earlier, even if they have had no symptoms. It is an inexpensive way to get a lot of useful data.

“Bhattacharya says the results probably undercount the prevalence in the wider population, because they miss anyone who has been infected too recently to have mounted an immune response, and exclude people in prisons, nursing homes and other institutional settings.”

A German study on April 9, 2020 had tested some 500 people in a village of more than 12,000 found that 1 in 7 had already been infected, overall estimating that 15% of their town was already infected. Christian Drosten (who submitted the PCR protocol to the WHO) warned this large spread may not be “indicitive” of the rest of Germany.

A few days later on April 20, 2020 USC and L.A. County Department of Public Health officials released the preliminary results of antibody testing of 863 adults, which show a surprising number of residents (4.1%) already had been infected with SARS-CoV-2 and produced antibodies. Their data suggested the virus had already spread far wider that case numbers revealed (only symptomatic people were tested) and that the infection fatality rate (IFR) was much lower than claimed – in line with a common flu. [1]

The IFR at this time ranged from 0.1 to 0.9%:

  • Santa Clara team estimated an IFR for the county of 0.12–0.2%, which would equate to about 100 deaths in 48,000-82,000 infections. As of 10 April, the county’s official death count was 50 people.
  • The study’s IFR is lower than the IFR used in models by researchers at Imperial College London, which estimated an IFR for Great Britain on the basis of data from China to be 0.9%.
  • In another study, the same group estimated an IFR for China of 0.66%,
  • Study of deaths on the Diamond Princess cruise ship estimated an IFR of 0.5%
  • March 2, 2020 WHO estimated an exceedingly high fatality rate at 3.4% globally

Officials were quick to caution the drawing conclusions from these antibody tests as most of them “haven’t been rigorously evaluated to ensure they are reliable.” [2]

The PCR test protocol by Christian Drosten et al, that was rolled out upon the world, was “peer reviewed” in less than 24 hours, and allowed to be amplified up to 45 times, how “rigorous” was that?