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2020 - Covid 19 Seroprevalencia de Anticuerpos en El Condado de Santa Clara, California
2020 - Covid 19 Seroprevalencia de Anticuerpos en El Condado de Santa Clara, California
Eran Bendavid1, Bianca Mulaney2, Neeraj Sood3, Soleil Shah2, Emilia Ling2, Rebecca Bromley-Dulfano2,
Cara Lai2, Zoe Weissberg2, Rodrigo Saavedra-Walker4, Jim Tedrow5, Dona Tversky6, Andrew Bogan7,
Thomas Kupiec8, Daniel Eichner9, Ribhav Gupta10, John P.A. Ioannidis1,10, Jay Bhattacharya1
1
Department of Medicine, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford CA
2
Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford CA
3
Sol Price School of Public Policy, University of Southern California, Los Angeles CA
4
Health Education is Power, Inc., Palo Alto CA
5
The Compliance Resource Group, Inc., Oklahoma City OK
6
Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford
CA
7
Bogan Associates, LLC, Palo Alto CA
8
ARL BioPharma, Inc. , Oklahoma City OK
9
Sports Medicine Research and Testing Laboratory, Salt Lake City UT
10
Department of Epidemiology and Population Health, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford
CA
Corresponding author: Eran Bendavid MD, Department of Medicine, Stanford University, Stanford CA
94305. email: [email protected].
medRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.04.14.20062463.this version posted April 17, 2020. The copyright holder for this preprint
(which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity.
It is made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license .
Abstract
Background
Addressing COVID-19 is a pressing health and social concern. To date, many epidemic projections and
policies addressing COVID-19 have been designed without seroprevalence data to inform epidemic
parameters. We measured the seroprevalence of antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 in Santa Clara County.
Methods
On 4/3-4/4, 2020, we tested county residents for antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 using a lateral flow
immunoassay. Participants were recruited using Facebook ads targeting a representative sample of the
county by demographic and geographic characteristics. We report the prevalence of antibodies to SARS-
CoV-2 in a sample of 3,330 people, adjusting for zip code, sex, and race/ethnicity. We also adjust for test
performance characteristics using 3 different estimates: (i) the test manufacturer’s data, (ii) a sample of 37
positive and 30 negative controls tested at Stanford, and (iii) a combination of both.
Results
The unadjusted prevalence of antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 in Santa Clara County was 1.5% (exact
binomial 95CI 1.11-1.97%), and the population-weighted prevalence was 2.81% (95CI 2.24-3.37%).
Under the three scenarios for test performance characteristics, the population prevalence of COVID-19 in
Santa Clara ranged from 2.49% (95CI 1.80-3.17%) to 4.16% (2.58-5.70%). These prevalence estimates
represent a range between 48,000 and 81,000 people infected in Santa Clara County by early April, 50-
85-fold more than the number of confirmed cases.
Conclusions
The population prevalence of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in Santa Clara County implies that the infection is
much more widespread than indicated by the number of confirmed cases. Population prevalence estimates
can now be used to calibrate epidemic and mortality projections.
medRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.04.14.20062463.this version posted April 17, 2020. The copyright holder for this preprint
(which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity.
It is made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license .
Introduction
The first two cases of COVID-19 in Santa Clara County, California were identified in returning travelers
on January 31 and on February 1, 2020, and the third case was identified four weeks later on February 27,
2020.1 In the following month, nearly 1,000 additional cases were identified in Santa Clara County,
showing a pattern of rapid case increase reflective of community transmission as well as the scaling up of
SARS-CoV-2 viral testing that was common across many communities globally. In some countries, the
rapid increase in COVID-19 case counts and hospitalizations has overwhelmed health systems and led to
large reductions in social and economic activities. The measures adopted to slow the spread of COVID-19
were justified by projected estimates of health care system capacity and case fatality rate. These
projections suggested that, in the absence of strict measures to reduce transmission, the COVID-19
pandemic would overwhelm existing hospital bed and ICU capacity throughout the United States and lead
to over 2 million deaths.2
Measuring fatality rates and projecting the number of deaths depend on estimates of the total number of
infections. To date, in the absence of seroprevalence surveys, estimates of the fatality rate have relied on
the number of confirmed cases multiplied by an estimated factor representing unknown or asymptomatic
cases to arrive at the number of infections.3–6 However, the magnitude of that factor is highly uncertain.
Because the implications of infection fatality rate and projected deaths are large, the extent of COVID-19
infection under-ascertainment (the multiplier used to arrive from cases to infections) has been a topic of
great interest and provided estimates of the number of infections about 1-6-fold higher than the number of
cases.7–10 The extent of infection under-ascertainment has been difficult to assess because of three biasing
processes: (i) cases have been diagnosed with PCR-based tests, which do not provide information about
resolved infections; (ii) the majority of cases tested early in the course of the epidemic have been acutely
ill and highly symptomatic, while most asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic individuals have not been
tested; and (iii) PCR-based testing rates have been highly variable across contexts and over time, leading
to noisy relationships between the number of cases and infections. If, in the absence of interventions, the
epidemic’s early doubling time is estimated to be four days6,11,12, then by February 27th, 2020, when the
third case was identified in Santa Clara County, the county may have already had 256 infections.
At the time of this study, Santa Clara County had the largest number of confirmed cases of any county in
Northern California (1,094). The county also had several of the earliest known cases of COVID-19 in the
state - including one of the first presumed cases of community-acquired disease - making it an especially
appropriate location to test a population-level sample for the presence of active and past infections.
On April 3rd and 4th, 2020 we conducted a survey of residents of Santa Clara County to measure the
seroprevalence of antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 and better approximate the number of infections. Our goal
is to provide new and well-measured data for informing epidemic models, projections, and public policy
decisions.
Methods
We conducted serologic testing for SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in 3,330 adults and children in Santa Clara
County using capillary blood draws and a lateral flow immunoassay. In this section we describe our
sampling and recruitment approaches, specimen collection methods, antibody testing procedure, test kit
validation, and statistical methods. Our protocol was informed by a World Health Organization protocol
for population-level COVID-19 antibody testing.13 We conducted our study with the cooperation of the
medRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.04.14.20062463.this version posted April 17, 2020. The copyright holder for this preprint
(which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity.
It is made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license .
Santa Clara County Department of Public Health. The IRB at Stanford University approved the study
prior to recruitment.
Statistical Analysis
Our estimation of the population prevalence of COVID-19 proceeded in three steps. First, we reported the
raw frequencies of positive tests as a proportion of the final sample size. Second, we re-weighted our
sample by zip code, sex, and race/ethnicity (non-Hispanic White, Asian, Hispanic, and other). We chose
these three adjustors because they contributed to the largest imbalance in our sample, and because
including additional adjustors would result in small-N bins. Our weights were the zip-sex-race proportion
in Santa Clara County divided by the zip-sex-race proportion in our sample, for each zip-sex-race
combination in the county and in the sample.
medRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.04.14.20062463.this version posted April 17, 2020. The copyright holder for this preprint
(which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity.
It is made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license .
$
𝑁!"#
)
𝑁
𝑤𝑒𝑖𝑔ℎ𝑡!"# = %&%'(
*
𝑁!"#
*
𝑁%&%'(
Where 𝑁 ) represents county counts, 𝑁 * represents sample counts, and the subscripts zsr identifies the
unique zip-sex-race groups. These weights were then applied to the entire sample. To provide a concrete
example, suppose the populations of two zip codes (A and B) include 10,000 men and 10,000 women.
Our sample included 250 men and 500 women from zip A, and 750 men and 1500 women from zip B.
This is exemplary of the imbalance in our sample. Applying the formula above, we get a weight of 3 for
men in zip A, 1.5 for women in zip A, 1 for men in zip B, and 0.5 for women in zip B.
Third, we adjusted the prevalence for test sensitivity and specificity. Because SARS-CoV-2 lateral flow
assays are new, we applied three scenarios of test kit sensitivity and specificity. The first scenario uses
the manufacturer’s validation data (S1). The second scenario uses sensitivity and specificity from a
sample of 37 known positive (RT-PCR-positive and IgG or IgM positive on a locally-developed ELISA)
and 30 known pre-COVID negatives tested on the kit at Stanford (S2). The third scenario combines the
two collections of samples (manufacturer and local sample) as a single pooled sample (S3). We use the
delta method to estimate standard errors for the population prevalence, which accounts for sampling error
and propagates the uncertainty in the sensitivity and specificity in each scenario. A more detailed version
of the formulas we use in our calculations is available in the Appendix to this paper.
Results
The test kit used in this study (Premier Biotech, Minneapolis, MN) was tested in a Stanford laboratory
prior to field deployment. Among 37 samples of known PCR-positive COVID-19 patients with positive
IgG or IgM detected on a locally-developed ELISA test, 25 were kit-positive. A sample of 30 pre-COVID
samples from hip surgery patients were also tested, and all 30 were negative. The manufacturer’s test
characteristics relied on samples from clinically confirmed COVID-19 patients as positive gold standard
and pre-COVID sera for negative gold standard. Among 75 samples of clinically confirmed COVID-19
patients with positive IgG, 75 were kit-positive, and among 85 samples with positive IgM, 78 were kit-
positive. Among 371 pre-COVID samples, 369 were negative. Our estimates of sensitivity based on the
manufacturer’s and locally tested data were 91.8% (using the lower estimate based on IgM, 95 CI 83.8-
96.6%) and 67.6% (95 CI 50.2-82.0%), respectively. Similarly, our estimates of specificity are 99.5% (95
CI 98.1-99.9%) and 100% (95 CI 90.5-100%). A combination of both data sources provides us with a
combined sensitivity of 80.3% (95 CI 72.1-87.0%) and a specificity of 99.5% (95 CI 98.3-99.9%).
Our study included 3,439 individuals that registered for the study and arrived at testing sites. We excluded
observations of individuals who could not be tested (e.g. unable to obtain blood or blood clotted, N=49),
whose test results could not be matched to their personal data (e.g. if an incorrect participant ID was
recorded onsite, N=30) , who did not reside in Santa Clara County (N=29), and who had invalid test
results (no Control band, N=1). This yielded an analytic sample of 3,330 individuals with complete
records including survey registration, attendance at a test site for specimen collection, and lab results
(Figure 1). The sample distribution meaningfully deviated from that of the Santa Clara County
population along several dimensions: sex (63% in sample was female, 50% in county); race (8% of the
sample was Hispanic, 26% in the county; 19% of the sample was Asian, 28% in the county); and zip
medRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.04.14.20062463.this version posted April 17, 2020. The copyright holder for this preprint
(which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity.
It is made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license .
distribution (median participant density per 1,000 population 1.6, IQR 0.9-3.6). Table 1 includes
demographic characteristics of our unadjusted sample, population-adjusted sample, and Santa Clara
County.16 Figure 2 shows the geographical zip code distribution of study participants in the county
(counts and density per 1,000 population).
The total number of positive cases by either IgG or IgM in our unadjusted sample was 50, a crude
prevalence rate of 1.50% (exact binomial 95% CI 1.11-1.97%). After weighting our sample to match
Santa Clara County by zip, race, and sex, the prevalence was 2.81% (95% CI 2.24-3.37 without clustering
the standard errors for members of the same household, and 1.45-4.16 with clustering). We further
improved our estimation using the available data on test kit sensitivity and specificity, using the three
scenarios noted above. The estimated prevalence was 2.49% (95CI 1.80%-3.17%) under the S1 scenario,
4.16% (95CI 2.58%-5.70%) under the S2 scenario, and 2.75% (95CI 2.01%-3.49%) under the S3
scenario. Notably, the uncertainty bounds around each of these population prevalence estimates
propagates the uncertainty in each of the three component parameters: sample prevalence, test sensitivity,
and test specificity.
Discussion
After adjusting for population and test performance characteristics, we estimate that the seroprevalence of
antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 in Santa Clara County is between 2.49% and 4.16%, with uncertainty bounds
ranging from 1.80% (lower uncertainty bound of the lowest estimate), up to 5.70% (upper uncertainty
bound of the highest estimate). Test performance characteristics are the most critical driver of this range,
with lower estimates associated with data suggesting the test has a high sensitivity for identifying SARS-
CoV-2, and higher estimates resulting from data suggesting over 30% of positive cases are missed by the
test.
These results represent the first large-scale community-based prevalence study in a major US county
completed during a rapidly changing pandemic, and with newly available test kits. We consider our
estimate to represent the best available current evidence, but recognize that new information, especially
about the test kit performance, could result in updated estimates. For example, if new estimates indicate
test specificity to be less than 97.9%, our SARS-CoV-2 prevalence estimate would change from 2.8% to
less than 1%, and the lower uncertainty bound of our estimate would include zero. On the other hand,
lower sensitivity, which has been raised as a concern with point-of-care test kits, would imply that the
population prevalence would be even higher. New information on test kit performance and population
should be incorporated as more testing is done and we plan to revise our estimates accordingly.
The most important implication of these findings is that the number of infections is much greater than the
reported number of cases. Our data imply that, by April 1 (three days prior to the end of our survey)
between 48,000 and 81,000 people had been infected in Santa Clara County. The reported number of
confirmed positive cases in the county on April 1 was 956, 50-85-fold lower than the number of
infections predicted by this study.17 The infection to case ratio, also referred to as an under-ascertainment
rate, of at least 50, is meaningfully higher than current estimates.10,18 This ascertainment rate is a
fundamental parameter of many projection and epidemiologic models, and is used as a calibration target
for understanding epidemic stage and calculating fatality rates.19,20 The under-ascertainment for COVID-
19 is likely a function of reliance on PCR for case identification which misses convalescent cases, early
spread in the absence of systematic testing, and asymptomatic or lightly symptomatic infections that go
undetected.
medRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.04.14.20062463.this version posted April 17, 2020. The copyright holder for this preprint
(which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity.
It is made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license .
The under-ascertainment of infections is central for better estimation of the fatality rate from COVID-19.
Many estimates of fatality rate use a ratio of deaths to lagged cases (because of duration from case
confirmation to death), with an infections-to-cases ratio in the 1-5-fold range as an estimate of under-
ascertainment.3,4,21 Our study suggests that adjustments for under-ascertainment may need to be much
higher.
We can use our prevalence estimates to approximate the infection fatality rate from COVID-19 in Santa
Clara County. As of April 10, 2020, 50 people have died of COVID-19 in the County, with an average
increase of 6% daily in the number of deaths. If our estimates of 48,000-81,000 infections represent the
cumulative total on April 1, and we project deaths to April 22 (a 3 week lag from time of infection to
death22), we estimate about 100 deaths in the county. A hundred deaths out of 48,000-81,000 infections
corresponds to an infection fatality rate of 0.12-0.2%. If antibodies take longer than 3 days to appear, if
the average duration from case identification to death is less than 3 weeks, or if the epidemic wave has
peaked and growth in deaths is less than 6% daily, then the infection fatality rate would be lower. These
straightforward estimations of infection fatality rate fail to account for age structure and changing
treatment approaches to COVID-19. Nevertheless, our prevalence estimates can be used to update
existing fatality rates given the large upwards revision of under-ascertainment.
While our prevalence estimates of 2.49% to 4.16% are representative of the situation in Santa Clara
County as of April 4, other areas are likely to have different seroprevalence estimates based on effective
contact rates in the community, social distancing policies to date, and relative disease progression. Our
prevalence estimate also suggests that, at this time, a large fraction of the population remains unexposed
in Santa Clara County. Repeated serologic testing in different geographies, spaced a few weeks apart,
could establish extent of infection over time.
This study had several limitations. First, our sampling strategy selected for members of Santa Clara
County with access to Facebook and a car to attend drive-through testing sites. This resulted in an over-
representation of white women between the ages of 19 and 64, and an under-representation of Hispanic
and Asian populations, relative to our community. Those imbalances were partly addressed by weighting
our sample population by zip code, race, and sex to match the county. We did not account for age
imbalance in our sample, and could not ascertain representativeness of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in
homeless populations. Other biases, such as bias favoring individuals in good health capable of attending
our testing sites, or bias favoring those with prior COVID-like illnesses seeking antibody confirmation are
also possible. The overall effect of such biases is hard to ascertain.
The Premier Biotech serology test used in this study has not been approved by the FDA by the time of the
study, and validation studies for this assay are ongoing. We used existing test performance data to
establish a range of sensitivity and specificity, including reliable but small-size data sourced at Stanford.
Test sensitivity varied between the manufacturer’s data and the local data. It is possible that
asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic individuals may generate only low-titer antibodies, and that
sensitivity may be even lower if there are many such cases.23 Additional validation of the assays used
could improve our estimates and those of ongoing serosurveys.
Several teams worldwide have started testing population samples for SARS CoV-2 antibodies, with
preliminary findings consistent with a large under-ascertainment of SARS CoV-2 infections. Reports
from the town of Robbio, Italy, where the entire population was tested, suggest at least 10%
seropositivity;24 and data from Gangelt, a highly affected area in Germany,25 point to 14% seropositivity.
medRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.04.14.20062463.this version posted April 17, 2020. The copyright holder for this preprint
(which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity.
It is made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license .
A recent effort to test the town of Telluride, Colorado is underway, and interim results suggest a
prevalence just under 2%.26 Our data from Santa Clara county suggest higher spread of the infection than
Telluride but lower than some areas in Europe.
We conclude that based on seroprevalence sampling of a large regional population, the prevalence of
SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in Santa Clara County was between 2.49% and 4.16% by early April. While this
prevalence may be far smaller than the theoretical final size of the epidemic,27 it suggests that the number
of infections is 50-85-fold larger than the number of cases currently detected in Santa Clara County.
These new data should allow for better modeling of this pandemic and its progression under various
scenarios of non-pharmaceutical interventions. While our study was limited to Santa Clara County, it
demonstrates the feasibility of seroprevalence surveys of population samples now, and in the future, to
inform our understanding of this pandemic’s progression, project estimates of community vulnerability,
and monitor infection fatality rates in different populations over time. It is also an important tool for
reducing uncertainty about the state of the epidemic, which may have important public benefits.
medRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.04.14.20062463.this version posted April 17, 2020. The copyright holder for this preprint
(which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity.
It is made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license .
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medRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.04.14.20062463.this version posted April 17, 2020. The copyright holder for this preprint
(which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity.
It is made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license .
Figures
Figure 1
Figure 1: Of 3,439 individuals that arrived for testing, samples could not be obtained or tested (e.g. blood
clotted) on 49, and an additional 60 were excluded because of invalid data (e.g. residence outside Santa
Clara County), test data that could not be matched to a participant, or invalid test results. The final sample
contained 3,330 records.
medRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.04.14.20062463.this version posted April 17, 2020. The copyright holder for this preprint
(which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity.
It is made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license .
Figure 2
medRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.04.14.20062463.this version posted April 17, 2020. The copyright holder for this preprint
(which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity.
It is made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license .
Figure 2: The number of registrations with complete records in our analytic dataset by zip code (panel A),
and the participant rate per 1,000 residents in the zip code (panel B).
medRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.04.14.20062463.this version posted April 17, 2020. The copyright holder for this preprint
(which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity.
It is made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license .
Tables
Table 1: Sample characteristics, relative to Santa Clara County population estimates from the 2018
American Community Survey
Table 2: Prevalence estimation in Santa Clara County. We report the prevalence and uncertainty bounds
of estimates from unadjusted frequency counts, population-adjusted estimates, and population-adjusted +
test performance-adjusted estimates. For the population-adjusted + test performance-adjusted estimates,
we show estimates using the three test performance scenarios described in the Methods. For each point
estimate, we present the method used to estimate the uncertainty bounds. Where noted, we clustered the
standard errors for participants that brought a child with them (members of the same household).
1.07-1.93 (normal
approximation, cluster
adjusted)
1.45-4.16 (normal
approximation, cluster
adjusted)
Article Information
Corresponding author
Eran Bendavid, [email protected]
Conflict of interest
None. Of note, test kits were purchased from Premier Biotech for this study, and none of the authors have
a relationship to the test manufacturer (beyond purchasing the tests).
Funding/Support
We acknowledge many individual donors who generously supported this project with gift awards.
Role of Funders
Our funders had no role in the design and conduct of the study, nor in the decision to prepare and submit
the manuscript for publication.