Adapting Serosurveys for the SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine Era

Nathan Duarte; Mercedes Yanes-Lane; Rahul K Arora; Niklas Bobrovitz; Michael Liu; Mariana G Bego; Tingting Yan; Christian Cao; Celine Gurry; Catherine A Hankins; Matthew Pellan Cheng; Anne-Claude Gingras; Bruce D Mazer; Jesse Papenburg; Marc-André Langlois

doi:10.1093/ofid/ofab632

Adapting Serosurveys for the SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine Era

Open Forum Infect Dis. 2021 Dec 23;9(2):ofab632. doi: 10.1093/ofid/ofab632. eCollection 2022 Feb.

Authors

Nathan Duarte¹, Mercedes Yanes-Lane², Rahul K Arora^{3

4}, Niklas Bobrovitz^{5

6}, Michael Liu⁷, Mariana G Bego², Tingting Yan⁵, Christian Cao³, Celine Gurry⁸, Catherine A Hankins^{2

9}, Matthew Pellan Cheng¹⁰, Anne-Claude Gingras^{11

12}, Bruce D Mazer^{2

13}, Jesse Papenburg^{9

14

15}, Marc-André Langlois^{16

17}

Affiliations

¹ Department of Systems Design Engineering, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.
² COVID-19 Immunity Task Force, Secretariat, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
³ Department of Community Health Sciences, University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta, Canada.
⁴ Institute of Biomedical Engineering, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK.
⁵ Temerty Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
⁶ Department of Critical Care Medicine, University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta, Canada.
⁷ Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts, USA.
⁸ Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, Oslo, Norway.
⁹ Department of Epidemiology, Biostatistics, and Occupational Health, School of Population and Global Health, Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
¹⁰ Divisions of Infectious Diseases and Medical Microbiology, McGill University Health Centre, Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
¹¹ Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute, Mount Sinai Hospital, Sinai Health System, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
¹² Department of Molecular Genetics, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
¹³ Division of Allergy and Immunology, Montreal Children's Hospital, Research Institute of the McGill University Health Center, Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
¹⁴ Division of Pediatric Infectious Diseases, Department of Pediatrics, Montreal Children's Hospital, Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
¹⁵ Division of Microbiology, Department of Clinical Laboratory Medicine, McGill University Health Centre, Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
¹⁶ Department of Biochemistry, Microbiology, and Immunology, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Canada.
¹⁷ University of Ottawa Center for Infection, Immunity and Inflammation (CI3), Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.

Abstract

Population-level immune surveillance, which includes monitoring exposure and assessing vaccine-induced immunity, is a crucial component of public health decision-making during a pandemic. Serosurveys estimating the prevalence of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) antibodies in the population played a key role in characterizing SARS-CoV-2 epidemiology during the early phases of the pandemic. Existing serosurveys provide infrastructure to continue immune surveillance but must be adapted to remain relevant in the SARS-CoV-2 vaccine era. Here, we delineate how SARS-CoV-2 serosurveys should be designed to distinguish infection- and vaccine-induced humoral immune responses to efficiently monitor the evolution of the pandemic. We discuss how serosurvey results can inform vaccine distribution to improve allocation efficiency in countries with scarce vaccine supplies and help assess the need for booster doses in countries with substantial vaccine coverage.

Keywords: 19; 2; COVID; CoV; SARS; cross; sectional; seroprevalence; vaccines.