Mnementh said:
This Gangelt study is getting real critic from other medical scientist. A main problem seems to be, that it can't really differentiate between antibodies against different Coronaviruses. As other more harmless Coronaviruses are causing common cold (not the flu, that is not a Coronavirus at all), it might have been these people had a common cold and antibodies against that, but still not against COVID-19. The study didn't take that into account. EDIT: source in german https://www.sueddeutsche.de/wissen/heinsberg-studie-herdenimmunitaet-kritik-1.4873480 |
Antibodies target a single antigen, and these tests are done with Covid-19 antigens to see if there's an immune response. While it's technically right to assume closely related viruses could elicit the same immune response due to cross-reactive immunity, it does also mean that whatever is in these people's blood has specifically reacted to Covid-19 antigens and would (very likely) neutralize the virus.
Not to mention that an alternative explanation would be needed for the antigen tests, as to why this specific sample in time is 20 times more infected than the average for German population since the beginning of the epidemic, three weeks into a soft lockdown. Also an alternative explanation concerning why a disease that the average adult has ikely faced dozens of times in their lifetime - as it would be a common cold caused by one of the endemic coronavirus variants - hasn't preliminarly left antibodies in more than 15% of the population, a month after winter.
Of course, in any case more data is still needed before any extrapolation, but there's nothing indicating that the (as highly capacitated or more as the man criticizing it) people behind this study are dabbling in pseudoscience.
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