CHICAGO CITY WIRE has this story (with thanks to FREE REPUBLIC):
A phlebotomist working at Roseland Community Hospital said Thursday that 30% to 50% of patients tested for the coronavirus have antibodies while only around 10% to 20% of those tested have the active virus.
Sumaya Owaynat, a phlebotomy technician, said she tests between 400 and 600 patients on an average day in the parking lot at Roseland Community Hospital. Drive-thru testing is from 9 a.m. to noon and 1 to 4 p.m. each day. However, the hospital has a limited number of tests they can give per day.
Owaynat said the number of patients coming through the testing center who appear to have already had coronavirus and gotten over it is far greater than those who currently have the disease.
“A lot of people have high antibodies, which means they had the coronavirus but they don’t have it anymore and their bodies built the antibodies,” Owaynat told Chicago City Wire.
Antibodies in the bloodstream reveal that a person has already had the coronavirus and may be immune to contracting the virus again.
If accurate, this means the spread of the virus may have been underway in the Roseland community – and the state and country as a whole – prior to the issuance of stay at home orders and widespread business closures in mid-March which have crippled the national economy….
A hat-tip to an unnamed friend from Facebook who didn’t want to post a DAILY WIRE article on her Facebook for fear of retaliation…
…At a hospital in Chicago, a non-randomized sample found that 30-50% of patients tested for COVID-19 have antibodies in their system, suggesting they already had the virus and have potential immunity.
“A phlebotomist working at Roseland Community Hospital said Thursday that 30% to 50% of patients tested for the coronavirus have antibodies while only around 10% to 20% of those tested have the active virus,” Chicago City Wire reported Thursday.
“Sumaya Owaynat, a phlebotomy technician, said she tests between 400 and 600 patients on an average day in the parking lot at Roseland Community Hospital. Drive-thru testing is from 9 a.m. to noon and 1 to 4 p.m. each day. However, the hospital has a limited number of tests they can give per day,” the report detailed. “Owaynat said the number of patients coming through the testing center who appear to have already had coronavirus and gotten over it is far greater than those who currently have the disease.”
“A lot of people have high antibodies, which means they had the coronavirus but they don’t have it anymore, and their bodies built the antibodies,” Owaynat told Chicago City Wire.
[….]
An antibody test study is reportedly underway in California by researchers at Stanford University.
“Researchers at Stanford Medicine are working to find out what proportion of Californians have already had COVID-19. The new study could help policymakers make more informed decisions during the coronavirus pandemic,” KSBW 8 News reported. “The team tested 3,200 people at three Bay Area locations on Saturday using an antibody test for COVID-19 and expect to release results in the coming weeks.”
This study mentioned at Stanford was brought up in conversation last week by my oldest son, and we are all (as a family) curious if the most vulnerable already had it as my father-in-law was pretty sick a few months back. Here is Victor Davis Hanson speaking to this issue with reference to the Stanford study as well (VDH is part of the Hoover Institution).
This article from PATCH is a bit critical of Hanson, but all-in-all, the common sense factor is there for me. Let me just say I am not convinced by the rejection of something stated without a refutation of the evidences mentioned. Chicago is already disproving Patch’s “expert input,” plus, I do not have to be an evolutionary biologist to critique neo-Darwinian theory, nor a woman to discuss the factual ending of a human life in the womb.
I am a fan, however, of this CLASSIC statement by William F. Buckley:
- “I would rather be governed by the first 2000 people in the Boston telephone directory than by the 2000 people on the faculty of Harvard University.”
(See also this MERCURY NEWS article on what Stanford has and is doing):
….“When you add it all up it would be naïve to think that California did not have some exposure,” Hanson told KSBW 8.
Stanford Medicine is conducting a study that may back up his assertion.
Stanford researchers took blood samples from approximately 3,200 volunteers in Santa Clara County on Friday and Saturday according to The Stanford Daily.
The test will show whether someone has been infected with the virus, including those who experienced mild or no symptoms, Stanford Associate Professor of Medicine Eran Bendavid told The Stanford Daily.
“It’s hard to stand up in this epidemic and say, ‘Look, we really don’t know if this epidemic is impending Armageddon,'” Bendavid said. “In order to know and reduce that uncertainty, you need numbers.”
Hanson believes the numbers could show that more Californians have been exposed to the virus than was previously known.
“One less-mentioned hypothesis is that California, as a front-line state, may have rather rapidly developed a greater level of herd immunity than other states, given that hints, anecdotes, and some official indications from both China and Italy that, again, the virus may well have been spreading abroad far earlier than the first recorded case in the U.S. —and likely from the coasts inward,” he wrote in a March 31 National Review column.
“So given the state’s unprecedented direct air access to China, and given its large expatriate and tourist Chinese communities, especially in its huge denser metropolitan corridors in Los Angeles and the Bay Area, it could be that what thousands of Californians experienced as an unusually “early” and “bad” flu season might have also reflected an early coronavirus epidemic, suggesting that many more Californians per capita than in other states may have acquired immunity to the virus.”…
AMERICAN THINKER joins the fray as well:
…In my home state of Colorado, “Health officials now believe the new coronavirus was circulating in Colorado as early as mid-January, about six weeks before the state even had the ability to test people for the disease.” These individuals, if extremely sick, might test negative for influenza and other known viruses, yet might still have a rough course just as the current COVID-19 patients are experiencing.
Again, if cases were circulating in the U.S. in mid-January, first cases were a month or two earlier, some symptomatic, some asymptomatic, but all below the radar.
Where were these first patients coming from? U.S. Customs and Border Protection reports, “Some 14,000 people flew into the U.S. from China each day — almost 5 million for that year.” Let me repeat, 14,000 people each day.
This was likely higher during the Christmas holidays with American students studying in China, and vice versa, returning home in December, then back to school in January. How many of these young people were asymptomatic carriers, bringing the Wuhan virus to parents, grandparents, and their professors?…