Thread on this story from MIT about a German #coronavirus antibody test, which seems to bury its own lead and I think actually has quite promising data. https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/04/09/999015/blood-tests-show-15-of-people-are-now-immune-to-covid-19-in-one-town-in-germany/

This article is actually an excellent argument for ending the lockdowns, because if you could randomly sample Germany nationwide and come up with a 14% antibody rate, that WAY exceeds the current infection and death rate among Germany's 83 million people.

Right now, Germany is saying 3,215 total people have died. If 14% of the country has already had it, that means 11.6 million people! Let's say Germany goes back and finds the virus was there much longer, as I theorize, and crazily multiplies the number dead by 20.

Then let's say, just for the sake of argument, Germany doesn't similarly reverse engineer its infection numbers, too, but leaves those the same. Which it would have to, obviously, but again I'm using extremely one-sided math against my argument to make a point.

That's 64,300 deaths out of 11.6 million infections for a maximum case fatality rate of .6% (or .07% of the total population). Germany's current CFR is 2.5%, so that's a MASSIVE decline. For further perspective, that would mean twice as many Germans die from suicide each year.

Now, here's why MIT has a different opinion of their data than I do. It comes down to this question: when is your baseline for exposure to the virus?

If my theory is right, that this virus has been here a lot longer than we think, then this is absolutely promising data. And MIT even says in this article the main exposure to the virus in this German town occurred at a carnival, which was held on February 15th.

That is more than a month before Germany initiated a national lockdown on March 22nd.

Finally, Stanford should be release its antibody study soon. Hopefully we'll get more answers there.

P.S. at the very least this study shows we need to begin building herd immunity ASAP, and the longer we wait the more painful that process may be.