I don't think any of the primary authors of the Stanford seroprevalence study are on Twitter, but there are some questions about the work that I haven't seen asked elsewhere that I would love to see addressed at some point. medrxiv.org/content/10.110…
1) The paper mentions that adults were allowed to bring one child with them, and that 889 children registered. It's unclear how many children were actually tested but this suggests that on the order of 1/4 of participants were children of a participating adult.
It's odd that no mention of this was made elsewhere in the paper. Was there a correlation between antibody positive adults and their child? If one assumes high intrafamily spread, as has been widely reported, this would lead to an approximately 33% overestimate of the prevalence.
2) In an interview w/@NatureNews Bendavid mentions that they did a second assessment of the test had 2/30 false negatives and 0/88 false positives. The false negatives number is markedly different than what was reported in the paper. Why is this?
Did sample processing change or some other feature of the test? Why, if these data were available at the time of posting the preprint were they not used? It is worth noting that using these new numbers would have lowered the prevalence estimate, so this is an important issue.
3) It's unusual to have the manager of a Hedge Fund as an author on a scientific paper. Was he one of the individual donors who funded the work? You report no conflict of interests of the authors, but can you say anything about conflicts of the funders?
Also unusual is for the author of a paper to time the release of an OpEd to the release of the paper, and to make no mention therein that the author of the OpEd is also an author of said paper. wsj.com/articles/new-d…
