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Comment by viceroyalbean | Hacker News Reader

>The herd immunity strategy is working, antibody testing shows around 30% of Stockholm is already immune

This isn't true (or, at least, isn't supported by studies). There was indeed a report [1] published that claimed that 30% of Stockholm has been infected, but it was a mathematical model and not antibody testing.

A study was recently published that showed that 11% of people in Stockholm had antibodies, but that was retracted [2] (only have Swedish sources for this, sorry) because the researchers didn't think that it was good enough.

[1] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.15.20066050v... [2] https://www.svt.se/nyheter/inrikes/nya-antikroppstestet-base...

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It was 11 out of 100 people, using an antibody test that's known to have some false positives. So the error bars are huge. (The fact that this result has metastasized into obvious nonsense is exactly why people should be careful publishing incomplete scientific results.)

This new test from Karolinska Institute cannot have false positives, only false negatives. However, the way the test was conducted was indeed incorrect (they accidentally included people who gave blood because they were infected so it was not random). They will conduct a new test so let's see what that says.

There is no such thing as test without false positives so that's your clue. Especially antibody tests typically have 4% false positive, just a day ago there was news that revealed 4% false positive for a test claimed to have 0.5%.

My clue for what? I'm not the one who is saying this, it's Karolinska Institute saying their new antibody test has no false positives: https://www.svt.se/nyheter/inrikes/11-procent-av-stockholmar...

> The fact that this result has metastasized into obvious nonsense is exactly why people should be careful publishing incomplete scientific results.

On top of that, the situation is fluid and changing almost daily. I saw a meme a couple of days ago about covid-19 being no big deal with tons of people agreeing, and the data was from 4/1. It's not a surprise, but it concerns how few people are a) critical of what they see and b) refuse to change their mind when new information arises.

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