Researchers say the ‘true extent’ of the pandemic may be 50 times larger than previously believed. What that really means — and why you should be skeptical.
The number of COVID-19 cases in Los Angeles County may be more than 50 times greater than the official count, according to preliminary results from a new study by the University of Southern California, which estimates that as many as 442,000 adult residents of Los Angeles County may have already been infected.
Story continuesBoth serosurveys worked the same way. Researchers recruited hundreds or thousands of local residents to participate. They tried to ensure their “sample” was representative of the county’s overall population.
One criticism is that the antibody test they used — a kit purchased from Premier Biotech in Minneapolis — has a false positive rate as high as 1.7 percent, according to some estimates, meaning that even if you test only people who have never had the disease, as many as 1.7 percent of them would still test positive.
Statistician John Cherian of D. E. Shaw Research, a computational biochemistry company, made his own calculations given the test’s sensitivity and specificity — and conservatively estimated the proportion of truly positive people in the Stanford study to range from 0.2 percent to 2.4 percent of the Santa Clara population. Adjusting for demographics, Cherian’s calculations suggest that county prevalence could plausibly be under 1 percent.
The USC team did not immediately release their methodology, so it’s difficult to compare their findings to Stanford’s. One difference, according to the lead investigator, was recruitment: Instead of using Facebook, USC called and emailed a random assortment of Angelenos from the database of an L.A. market research firm, then set quotas meant to mimic the demographics of the county as a whole.
In the meantime, it’s worth keeping the two takeaways touted Monday by USC’s lead investigator in perspective. The first, Sood claimed, is that “the fatality rate is lower than what we thought it would be” — as low as 0.1 percent or 0.2 percent, if both studies are accurate. But again, we don’t know if they are, and we have reason to suspect that their estimates of the total COVID-19 case count are much too high, which would make their estimates of the fatality rate much too low.
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