STANFORD, April 19 (WNM/Stanford University) - A serological study by Stanford University (https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.14.20062463v1) found antibodies in 50 to 85 times more people than previously thought in Santa Clara County, California, resulting in a COVID-19 lethality of 0.12% to 0.2% or even lower.

In a new video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jGUgrEfSgaU), John P. A. Ioannidis, Professor in Disease Prevention in Stanford’s School of Medicine, explains the study results:

“This study aimed to generate an estimate of how many people in Santa Clara County have been infected with the virus. And the way to find out is to try to see whether they have developed antibodies. So we had a sample of residence in Santa Clara County evaluated for the presence of antibodies. That the sample was 3300 people who came to be tested. We estimated that based on what he saw between 2.5 and 4.2% of the population of the county has antibodies, which is an indication that they have been infected with the virus a while ago. 

If you compare the numbers that we estimated to have been infected which varied from 48,000 to 81,000 versus the number of documented cases that would correspond to the same time horizon around April 1st, when we had 956 cases documented in Santa Clara County, we realize that the number of infected people is somewhere between 50 and 85 times more compared to what we thought - compared to what had been documented. Immediately that means that the infection fatality rate – the chance of dying if you are in infected diminishes by 50- to 85-fold, because the denominator in the calculation becomes 50- to 85-fold bigger. Our data suggests that COVID-19 has an infection fatality rate that is in the same ballpark as seasonal influenza. It suggests that even though this is a very serious problem, we should not fear. It suggests that we have solid ground to have optimism about the possibility of eventually reopening our society and gaining back our lives.”