Member-only story
Beware The Antibody Test Results
Antibody testing is being touted as having provided information it hasn’t. This article argues that these results are wrong and dangerous.
On April 21, Dana G Smith published an article with the title “Early Antibody Studies in California Suggest High Infection Rates” which does make some effort at explaining the problems with the antibody tests used in the research, but in my opinion she comes up just a hair short of the degree of skepticism needed to ensure a healthy grasp of the situation in her reader. Unfortunately for us, she has probably done one of the better jobs I’ve seen of attempting to expose the problems with this line of thinking. This article will explain the issue with this present study in an attempt to help the reader understand why the antibody testing numbers are not to be trusted or relied upon.
The Issue
The situation is compounded by a variety of factors — for example, it is a violation of the rules of statistical mathematics to attempt to generalize a conclusion about a population if the sample from which the data was taken was not randomly selected. Additionally, there is a political dynamic that is ongoing during this situation which is frankly toxic and eager to lead us to make bad choices.