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Comment by Jabbles | Hacker News Reader

TLDR: an interesting discussion of a superspreader event:

117 people, 107 of whom were fully vaccinated, attended a party for 4.5 hours after checking themselves with a rapid antigen test.

66 of them were confirmed to have omicron less than 3 weeks later, the vast majority developing symptoms within 5 days. 15 others had covid that was not confirmed to be omicron.

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Worth noting that of those there were 0 hospitalized and most were asymptomatic or had vary mild symptoms.

None of the cases required hospitalisation up to 13 December 2021.

I’m going to assume some off the antigen tests were faulty or could not pick up the new variant.

Antigen tests detect something different from the spike protein und can find Omicron variant cases just fine.

You can read more about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_rapid_antigen_test#Ne...

Likely false negative, or taken prior to symptom incubation, or somehow the guest evaded taking one at all.

Or just user error, though that could fall into a technical reading of "guest evaded taking one at all".

Rapid antigen tests have a relatively high rate of false negatives.

And only the one person returning from South Africa would have needed to actually be a false negative. The rest may have been true negatives.

I know someone who just got a positive PCR test and still got two negatives on at-home test kits.

Relatively high yes, but with emphasis on the relatively; I would be surprised that there would have been more than 3 false negatives.

Note that one of the issues with rapid tests is that they only work reliably once you become symptomatic - however, you may already be infectious about two days before that...

I think you mean false positives? Or are they just bad all-round?

No, false negatives: you're tested as negative but you, in fact, have the virus. This is common for rapid antigen tests, and especially so if self administered.

False positives are not tipically a problem for this kind of tests. It's like the pregnancy test: if you see the stripe, you're very, very likely pregnant. If you don't see it, you can't rule it out with the same certainty.

It was self reported testing before a Christmas party.

Few people have done any test like that in Scandinavia and willingness to lie about taking it is pretty high in my experience.

Based on what evidence you making that statement. For myself living in Sweden I can say that almost everyone does a self test when they have even the slightest of symptoms. Also I would argue of all places in the world, Scandinavia is probably the place where one would find the lowest propability of lying about a test.

At least in my social and work circles, it's pretty normal to take a test before attending a larger gathering, or meeting more vulnerable people.

But then, Denmark has an average of 17 tests per person, the highest in the world by some margin.

Norway is 1.6 per person, Finland 1.5 and Sweden 1.4.

59% (or 73% with the PCR-Positives) seems a rather high rate compared to any seasonal flue. How does it stack up to other airborne viruses?

As long as we don't know that the infected people isolated for three weeks, we do have a pretty high margin of error here. Also, we would have to seperete the infected into unvaccinated and vaccinated patients.

Only then can we reliably tell anything.

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