(Vox, May 16, 2020):
Preliminary results from a well-designed survey of antibody presence among Spaniards suggest that even as the Spanish outbreak exploded and then was brought under control, only 5 percent of the country’s population has been infected with the coronavirus so far. …
… Covid-19 optimists have pointed to a couple of flawed studies from California, both of which suggested that infection has been much more widespread than commonly assumed, and that consequently, the virus is much less lethal than commonly assumed.
The new Spanish survey (which is still underway) has a much higher-quality research design, and unfortunately, it has a much less reassuring result at this point: Only about 5 percent of people in the study have tested positive for Covid-19 antibodies, suggesting that just 5 percent of the Spanish population has had the coronavirus.
The study was carried out by the Carlos III Institute for Health and Spain’s National Statistics Institute, and thanks to that official backing, researchers were able to obtain samples from more than 36,000 randomly selected households across the country. (They tested nearly 70,000 people in total, meaning it’s a robust sample.) And precisely because the outbreak in Spain has been very bad, there was a much lower risk of the preliminary results being twisted by false positives.
What they found was that about 10-14 percent of the population in and around Madrid has antibodies, along with about 7 percent of the population of Barcelona and smaller numbers outside of Spain’s two major cities. Across the country, it averages out to roughly 5 percent.
