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A comment on Hundreds of thousands in L.A. may have been infected with coronavirus: study. Parent comment

Re:Hundreds of thousands in L.A. may have been infected with... by makomk on Monday April 20, 2020 @05:45PM (#22928980)
Not really. Antibody tests like this one measure the total number of people who've been infected at some point in the relatively recent past, whereas the diagnostic tests New York is using only detect current active infections, so it's easy for the percentage of infections measured by the former to be higher than the latter.

When articles like this compare the number of known cases detected with the PCR diagnostic tests with the higher estimate based on antibody testing, they're comparing the sum of all cases detected since the start of PCR coronavirus testing with a point-in-time estimate of the proportion of the population that currently has antibodies for exactly this reason.

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Re:Hundreds of thousands in L.A. may have been infected with... by kgwgk on Monday April 20, 2020 @06:53PM (#22929742)
That’s true. We could have 25% active infections and 25% not currently infected but who were infected in the past. I still think the actual numbers may be be lower (but higher than the reported figures, of course).
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