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New Abbott SARS-CoV-2 antibody test has 99.90% specificity and 100% sensitivity

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Re: New Abbott SARS-CoV-2 antibody test has 99.90% specificity and 100% sensitivity

#231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Weird cold" in February checking in. I did not have any temperature variations or fevers, but I got struck with a fatigue like no other. For the first time since I was 3 years old, I took afternoon naps three days in a row because I was just completely wiped out. It's rare for me to take a nap at all (happens maybe once a year)! It took two weeks to get out of this fatigued state. My other symptoms were "chills-like…

"Weird cold" in February checking in. Fever, back pain, chills, post nasal drip. Felt bad for ~3 days and then felt better. Getting antibody tested tomorrow, will report back.

Same here. Rushed to the hospital after two nights of not sleeping from the back pain and chills at end of Feb. First time I've ever taken an injection for pain relief.

Re: New Abbott SARS-CoV-2 antibody test has 99.90% specificity and 100% sensitivity

#232

I took this antibody test through LabCorp on Friday and tested positive. I have been in strict (see: paranoid) isolation with one other person since March 7 and haven't felt sick or anything close to it since then. I did have what I thought was a strange flu/cold early February with a sore throat, post-nasal drip, wildly varying body temperature, and lower back pains. In hindsight those are COVID-19 symptoms. the per…

Good anecdote. I also had a "weird cold" in February with symptoms that are unusual for me but typical of COVID-19, and have been waiting to get the antibody test. I kind of expect it to turn out the same way. (Otherwise, I would really like to figure out what the "weird cold" that everyone had in February was. Because it sure was weird, and everyone I know had it.)

I swear I had one of these too, but it was in December, in Vegas, at the AWS con. (It started thurs or fri, was kinda pissed cause I booked some extra days in town but ended up staying in)

I don't remember all the symptoms, but I remember thinking how weird it felt and that "with a cold or the flu I usually get X"

Not gonna call it covid because I don't have any proof, but a "weird cold" is definitely going around

Re: New Abbott SARS-CoV-2 antibody test has 99.90% specificity and 100% sensitivity

#233
post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if someone could point me to a nursing home where 5% of the population died in a week Sure, if we were talking about mortality rates but we’re not. we’re simply talking about prevalence of COVID prior to the major breakout of February and beyond. These are two completely different things to be looking at. I’ve worked in nursing homes during that time of December where people were dying. Did we think to send bloodwo…

I think you are missing the statistical point I and others are making. If the disease was introduced in a meaningful way in December/January it would be a statistical certainty we would see signs of it (such as nursing homes having huge waves of deaths or total mortality in subregions surging). I'm not sure what your counterclaim is? There are no samples in America tested from that time period that would show that th…

Why does it have to be introduced in a “meaningful way” to be relevant? If there was at most a single case of it within the U.S. that would show that the disease spread earlier than what is assumed. Again, your argument rests solely on the idea of there must be thousands of death in order for this disease to exist within the states. That is an odd way to think about this.

It’d also be kind of hard to go back and rerun tests for people during those months, which shows why it’s very difficult to pinpoint when this disease started to really spread. I mean, if France and China both had cases during the month of November and December, you’d be hard pressed to say it’s not possible there were similar cases in the U.S albeit undiscovered.

Re: New Abbott SARS-CoV-2 antibody test has 99.90% specificity and 100% sensitivity

#234
post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if someone could point me to a nursing home where 5% of the population died in a week Sure, if we were talking about mortality rates but we’re not. we’re simply talking about prevalence of COVID prior to the major breakout of February and beyond. These are two completely different things to be looking at. I’ve worked in nursing homes during that time of December where people were dying. Did we think to send bloodwo…

I think you are missing the statistical point I and others are making. If the disease was introduced in a meaningful way in December/January it would be a statistical certainty we would see signs of it (such as nursing homes having huge waves of deaths or total mortality in subregions surging). I'm not sure what your counterclaim is? There are no samples in America tested from that time period that would show that th…

What specific evidence would you be expecting to see in December or January? The infection fatality rate for this disease is probably below 1%, and we don't know what percentage of the population is infected. We don't truly know how quickly it spreads. Nursing home populations are at greater risk, but even if the IFR is 3-5% for that cohort, the population mortality would be some fraction of that, and most of the deaths would be people with pre-existing conditions, and the deaths would be attributed to those conditions.

If there was a year-on-year increase of 1-2% in nursing home deaths for a month or two, would that register with anybody? Maybe they would have noticed if a lot of people were being put on respirators? But if no one knew about COVID they would probably just chalk that up to it being a bad flu season.

Re: New Abbott SARS-CoV-2 antibody test has 99.90% specificity and 100% sensitivity

#235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keep in mind that many coronaviruses can cause loss of smell/taste.

But which other coronaviruses are widely circulating right now is the question. As in, if you were to lose your smell because of a coronavirus, how likely is it that it was not SARS-CoV-2?

I don't know the absolute figures in terms of cases per year, but the four common coronaviruses are... common. From [1], we see that 1 in 200 flu-like infections was the coronavirus HKU1. This [2] paper corroborates and gives figures for the other three common viruses.

We can therefore assume that about 1 in 25 bad-cold or flu-like illnesses are caused by a coronavirus.

1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5466428/

Re: New Abbott SARS-CoV-2 antibody test has 99.90% specificity and 100% sensitivity

#236
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good anecdote. I also had a "weird cold" in February with symptoms that are unusual for me but typical of COVID-19, and have been waiting to get the antibody test. I kind of expect it to turn out the same way. (Otherwise, I would really like to figure out what the "weird cold" that everyone had in February was. Because it sure was weird, and everyone I know had it.)

Same here, had a lingering cough for nearly a month. The other weird part is I had flu-like symptoms for 3-4 days before I had any congestion and a runny nose. I can't recall any other time I've had a cold that didn't result in congestion within 24 hours of the first sign symptoms like a cough or sore throat. Just an anecdote, won't know until I'm able to get tested.

Exactly the same symptoms and timeline. I wonder if airport at full volume "tagged" everyone that travelled in early Q1.

Re: New Abbott SARS-CoV-2 antibody test has 99.90% specificity and 100% sensitivity

#237

I took this antibody test through LabCorp on Friday and tested positive. I have been in strict (see: paranoid) isolation with one other person since March 7 and haven't felt sick or anything close to it since then. I did have what I thought was a strange flu/cold early February with a sore throat, post-nasal drip, wildly varying body temperature, and lower back pains. In hindsight those are COVID-19 symptoms. the per…

> sore throat, post-nasal drip, wildly varying body temperature, and lower back pains. In hindsight those are COVID-19 symptoms. > the person I live with took the same Abbott Architect antibody test from LabCorp today so that we can where did you get the test and how much?

Quest is apparently selling them too. Really difficult to get one confirmed in Texas anecdotaly.

Re: New Abbott SARS-CoV-2 antibody test has 99.90% specificity and 100% sensitivity

#238
post #208
post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1 out of 421 NYC residents have died, based on today's numbers, and recent serological tests estimated that 20% of residents were exposed. If that's right, then the death rate would be about 1/84, or about 1.2%. But I've seen other claims that the exposure rate in NYC is higher, which would give a lower fatality rate.

Don't forget to factor this breaking through to long term care facilities. From the last I looked at this, if it had not hit long term care, the number of deaths would have been low enough that it may have gone undetected longer. (In WA, 92% of the deaths are still folks over sixty! I don't know the numbers for how many of them were in long term care.) Which is to say, you can't just look at the population death rate…

> Don't forget to factor this breaking through to long term care facilities.

If they're not taking any precautions (because there's no knowledge of the virus in the community) then it can spread to those types of facilities very easily. In New Zealand where only 1,500 people have have COVID-19 (likely to be very accurate, 200,000 tests have been conducted) there's already been two outbreaks in nursing homes.

Re: New Abbott SARS-CoV-2 antibody test has 99.90% specificity and 100% sensitivity

#239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

afaik there havent we havent observed major functional mutations in the virus

The Strain that was seen in ny was more deadly than the strain seen on the west coast. And I’m not sure how many others are out there.

You want to use the word isolate. The SARS2 virus is a strain of the original SARS virus I think

Re: New Abbott SARS-CoV-2 antibody test has 99.90% specificity and 100% sensitivity

#240
post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the main evidence against it being here siginifgantly earlier is that we see how it spread when it was definitely here, so why wouldn't we have seen hot spots like Atlanta and New York earlier then?

Yeah - if someone could point me to a nursing home where 5% of the population died in a week in December/January I'd believe it - anecdotes about people being having the flu in the winter isn't the most convincing.

It is not particularly unusual for a nursing home to see very high death rates around flu season. In the UK, where they have an excellent healthcare system, the average lifespan of a nursing home resident is 2.2 years.

Link: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6143238/

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