Authors
Hans-Michael Kaltenbach, Fabian Rudolf, Janina Linnik, Julia Deichmann, Therese Ruf, Raffaele Altamura, Edo Kapetanovic, Derek Mason, Bastian Wagner, Thomas Goetz, Lukas Mundorff, Karin Stoll-Rudin, Christina Krebs, Tanja Renz, Thomas Hochueli, Sergio Haymoz, Markus Hosch, Nadine Periat, Michele Richert, Sergio Sesia, Daniel Paris, Carlos Beat Quinto, Nicole Probst-Hensch, Christoph Niederhauser, Sai Reddy, Beatrice Nickel, Miodrag Savic
Background
To accurately measure seroprevalance in the population, boththe expected immune response as well as the assay performances have to be well characterised. Here, we describe the collection and initial characterisation of a blood and saliva biobank obtained after the initial peak of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic in Switzerland.
Methods
Two laboratory ELISA assays measuring IgA & IgG (Euroimmun), and IgM & IgG (Epitope Diagnostics) were used to characterise the biobank collected from 349 re- and convalescent patients from the canton of Basel-Landschaft.
Findings
The antibody response in terms of recognized epitopes is diverse, especially in oligosymptomatic patients, while the average strength of the antibody response of the population does correlate with the severity of the disease at each time point.
Interpretation
The diverse immune response presents a challenge when conducting epidemiological studies as the used assays only detect 90% of the oligosymptomatic cases. This problem cannot be rectified by using more sensitive assays or lower cut-offs as they concomitantly reduce specificity. Funding Funding was obtained from the Amt fur Gesundheit of the canton Basel-Landschaft, Switzerland.
https://medrxiv.org/cgi/content/short/2020.07.05.20145888.full.pdf
