I& #39;ve seen a claim making the rounds today that a Japanese study found incredibly high rates of COVID antibodies in a group of people where no one got seriously ill, and therefore that we don& #39;t need precautions. A few thoughts threaded:

One, it& #39;s a preprint and hasn& #39;t peer-reviewed. So not exactly gospel yet. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.09.21.20198796v1.full.pdf">https://www.medrxiv.org/content/1...

Two, it looks at people commuting to various locations of one company in Tokyo. So not a generalizable sample, since the oldest participant was 69.

Three, they excluded people who developed symptoms, because the goal was to study asymptomatic people. That& #39;s fine. But it doesn& #39;t mean half of Japan got the virus and never noticed.

Four, it& #39;s great that 152 employees of this particular Japanese company didn& #39;t get sick despite being infected. That doesn& #39;t change that there are 200,000 Americans dead from COVID-19. End of thread.