Do the Divergent Results of COVID-19 Antibody Studies Reflect Real Differences?

How deadly is COVID-19? It has become increasingly clear that the answer varies from place to place. Local conditions affect not only the percentage of the population that is infected but also the percentage of those people who die as a result.

That point has been largely overlooked in the often heated debate about U.S. antibody studies, which has focused on methodological issues such as sampling bias and the accuracy of the tests used to determine who has been infected by the COVID-19 virus. While those issues are important, it’s misleading to assume that we are trying to identify the