Environmental Health and Preventive Medicine
Online ISSN : 1347-4715
Print ISSN : 1342-078X
ISSN-L : 1342-078X
A longitudinal study of anti-SARS-CoV-2 antibody seroprevalence in a random sample of the general population in Hiroshima in 2020
Aya Sugiyama, Fumie Okada, Kanon Abe, Hirohito Imada, Serge Ouoba, Bunthen E, Md Razeen Ashraf Hussain, Masayuki Ohisa, Ko Ko, Shintaro Nagashima, Tomoyuki Akita, Shinichi Yamazaki, Michiya Yokozaki, Eisaku Kishita, Junko Tanaka
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Keywords: SARS-CoV-2, Antibody test, Prevalence, Seroconversion, General population, Random sampling, Japan
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2022 Volume 27 Pages 30

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Abstract

Background: This longitudinal study aimed to determine chronological changes in the seroprevalence of prior SARS-CoV-2 infection, including asymptomatic infections in Hiroshima Prefecture, Japan.

Methods: A stratified random sample of 7,500 residents from five cities of Hiroshima Prefecture was selected to participate in a three-round survey from late 2020 to early 2021, before the introduction of the COVID-19 vaccine. The seroprevalence of anti–SARS-CoV-2 antibodies was calculated if at least two of four commercially available immunoassays were positive. Then, the ratio between seroprevalence and the prevalence of confirmed COVID-19 cases in Hiroshima was calculated and compared to the results from other prefectures where the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare conducted a survey by using the same reagents at almost the same period.

Results: The numbers of participants in the first, second, and third rounds of the survey were 3025, 2396, and 2351, respectively and their anti-SARS-CoV-2 antibodies seroprevalences were 0.03% (95% confidence interval: 0.00–0.10%), 0.08% (0.00–0.20%), and 0.30% (0.08–0.52%), respectively. The ratio between the seroprevalence and the prevalence of confirmed COVID-19 cases in Hiroshima was 1.2, which was smaller than that in similar studies in other prefectures.

Conclusions: The seroprevalence of anti–SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in Hiroshima increased tenfold in a half year. The difference between seroprevalence and the prevalence of confirmed COVID-19 cases in Hiroshima was smaller than that in other prefectures, suggesting that asymptomatic patients were more actively detected in Hiroshima.

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Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.
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