Copyright This informative article is copyright of the authors or their affiliated institutions, 2020. study conducted by Percivalle et al. on seroprevalence of severe acute respiratory Secretin (human) syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) in Lodi Red Zone, Lombardy, Italy [1]. While serosurveys are important public health equipment in understanding, dissecting, and giving an answer to outbreaks, they could still have problems with SOX18 two main problems: (i) inadvertent biased style and/or (ii) suboptimal serological assays utilized. In this scholarly study, 390 plasma specimens from evidently healthy (asymptomatic) bloodstream donors gathered from 18 March to 6 Apr 2020 had been screened. The 1st two coronavirus disease (COVID-19) instances in Italy had been recognized in two Chinese language vacationers in Rome, january 2020 [2] about 31. Subsequently, february 2020 [3] a cluster of instances was within Lombardy about 21. The writers in this research Secretin (human) [1] reported a seroprevalence of 23% in Lodi, Secretin (human) Italy among healthful bloodstream donors, which provided the current human population, means ca 11,845 instances were for the reason that little zone just 26?days following the initial cluster was detected in Lombardy. The writers of the analysis also demonstrated that just 5% of the donors had been positive for SARS-CoV-2 by RNA assay in support of 3% of seropositive instances had been also RNA positive. Provided the postponed seroconversion connected with this disease, this would imply that almost all the donors who examined positive from the neutralisation assay became contaminated at the start of the outbreak in Lombardy. July 2020 On 8, many weeks following this scholarly research is performed, the total amount of verified instances in Lombardy (human population ca 10?million), Italy, was 94,651 [4]. Furthermore, based Secretin (human) on the ChinaCWorld Wellness Corporation (WHO) joint report that was recently summarised in JAMA [5], 1C2% of cases are completely asymptomatic, and of symptomatic cases, ca 80% are mild or moderate. If we assume only the remaining 20% of the cases, i.e. severe and critical ones, are tested using RNA assays, the current seroprevalence is estimated to be around 4.7% in Lombardy. Since RNA testing has been expanded to more groups, the actual seroprevalence must even be lower than 4.7%. Had the authors used the samples from the very same donors in January 2020 and compared the test results with those of blood donations in March or April, by means of??4-fold rise in antibody titres, this would have shed more light on the true seroprevalence instead of using two different blood donor cohorts from two different time intervals. It remains a possibility that recent exposure to common coronaviruses among donors caused a boost in the SARS-CoV-2 neutralisation assay used in this study. Neutralisation assay, although being a gold standard assay in the world of serological diagnosis, has its own limitations, cross-reactivity among others; this has been repeatedly shown in other settings, a recent example being dengue vs Zika virus neutralisation assays [6]. Cross-reactivity with common coronaviruses using neutralisation assays has also been shown [7]. Authors used 30 pre-pandemic samples to assess the specificity of their neutralisation assay without clarifying the time between symptom onset and sample collection for the common coronaviruses as antibody response to these viruses is short-lived. Had the blood donors in this study had a recent common coronavirus infection, this would possess affected their SARS-CoV-2 neutralisation assay results possibly. Neutralisation assays are usually more particular when 90% inhibition of cytopathic impact with high end titres can be used as the cut-off. Using the cut-off titre of 10 with 50% inhibition of cytopathic impact, increases the level of sensitivity at the expense of decreasing the specificity. This idea was further recommended in this research by showing almost two third from the donors having got low neutralisation titres. Overall, while it can be appreciable that neutralisation assays are more superior to additional.