Hacker News Reader

Ok, so the interview is in Swedish (and Norwegian), but it is with Sweden's state epidemiologist at the Public Health Agency. He indicates that they have been taking antibody tests the last week as the basis for his prediction of flock immunity some time in May in the Stockholm region.

View on HN

As far as I'm aware the antibody tests are really unreliable? At least the millions of tests the UK bought are not being used for that reason.

As I understand it, the quick antibody tests are the unreliable ones. For these tests, the blood will be collected at home and sent to labs where i would suppose reliable tests will be done.

Also, the tests will begin next week and the results will be published end of April or beginning of May.

In principle even if the tests are unreliable in individual cases, if the false positive and negative rates are known sufficiently well it ought to be possible to use mass results to get an accurate estimate of the prevalence of what they're supposed to be measuring.

He said they tested people for immunity (my interpretation was antibody tests, maybe i was not correct in the actual type of test - but they are testing for "immunity" (antibodies?), somehow).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com