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Jubilee News Desk
A relatively few people tested positive for antibodies against SARS-CoV-2, researchers have found in Spain. Overall, the study found that only 5% of participants showed a positive result.
In one of Europe’s worst-hit countries, scientists selected randomly over 60000 people, but found that even in places with high infection rates like Madrid, only a few tested positive. Even in areas hard-hit by Covid-19, few people test positive for antibodies, meaning that hopes for herd immunity against the disease may be futile without a vaccine, the Spanish study finds.
Conducted by researchers at the Carlos III Health Institute in Madrid and published in The Lancet the study included 61,075 people in 35,883 randomly selected households throughout the country.
After completing a questionnaire between April 27 and May 11 on Covid-19 symptoms, participants received antibody test, followed by a blood draw for a laboratory immunoassay test if they agreed to it.
Overall, the study found that only 5% of participants showed a positive result on the point-of-care test, while 4.6% showed a positive result on the lab test. Results varied considerably by region, with residents of Madrid showing prevalence greater than 10%, while residents of coastal areas showed a prevalence of less than 3%.
Among 195 participants who had received a positive RT-PCR test for Covid-19 more than two weeks prior, positive tests for antibodies ranged from around 88-92%. In 7,273 individuals who had lost their sense of smell or showed at least three symptoms, 15.3-19.3% tested positive for antibodies, while 21.9-35.8% of those who were asymptomatic did as well, meaning that about one-third of infected people did not show symptoms.
With 250,545 confirmed cases and 28,385 deaths Spain has the third-highest prevalence of Covid-19 cases in Europe, after Russia and the UK. The US leads by far, with 2.9 million of the world’s 11.5 million cases and 130,007 of its 535,185 deaths. Spain issued new lockdown orders in its Galicia and Catalonia regions amid renewed outbreaks of Covid-19 in those areas, though Europe in general has managed to get the outbreak largely under control.
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