Seroprevalence of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in South Korea

Kwangmin Lee; Seongil Jo; Jaeyong Lee

doi:10.1007/s42952-021-00131-7

Seroprevalence of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in South Korea

J Korean Stat Soc. 2021;50(3):891-904. doi: 10.1007/s42952-021-00131-7. Epub 2021 May 24.

Authors

Kwangmin Lee¹, Seongil Jo², Jaeyong Lee¹

Affiliations

¹ Department of Statistics, Seoul National University, 1 Gwanak-ro, Gwanak-gu, Seoul, 08826 Republic of Korea.
² Department of Statistics, Inha University, 100 Inha-ro, Nam-Gu, Incheon, Republic of Korea.

Abstract

In 2020, Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency reported three rounds of surveys on seroprevalence of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) antibodies in South Korea. SARS-CoV-2 is the virus which inflicts the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). We analyze the seroprevalence surveys using a Bayesian method with an informative prior distribution on the seroprevalence parameter, and the sensitivity and specificity of the diagnostic test. We construct the informative prior of the sensitivity and specificity of the diagnostic test using the posterior distribution obtained from the clinical evaluation data. The constraint of the seroprevalence parameter induced from the known confirmed coronavirus 2019 cases can be imposed naturally in the proposed Bayesian model. We also prove that the confidence interval of the seroprevalence parameter based on the Rao's test can be the empty set, while the Bayesian method renders interval estimators with coverage probability close to the nominal level. As of the 30th of October 2020, the $95 %$ credible interval of the estimated SARS-CoV-2 positive population does not exceed 318, 685, approximately $0.62 %$ of the Korean population.

Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s42952-021-00131-7.

Keywords: Bayesian analysis; Informative prior; SARS-CoV-2; Seroprevalence.