Estimating the cumulative incidence of SARS-CoV-2 with imperfect serological tests: Exploiting cutoff-free approaches.

ABSTRACT: Large-scale serological testing in the population is essential to determine the true extent of the current SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. Serological tests measure antibody responses against pathogens and use predefined cutoff levels that dichotomize the quantitative test measures into sero-positives and negatives and use this as a proxy for past infection. With the imperfect assays that are currently available to test for past SARS-CoV-2 infection, the fraction of seropositive individuals in serosurveys is a biased estimator of the cumulative incidence and is usually corrected to account for the sensitivity and specificity. Here we use an inference method-referred to as mixture-model approach-for the estimation of the cumulative incidence that does not require to define cutoffs by integrating the q

SUBMITTER: Bouman JA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7946301 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature