Seroprevalence of anti-SARS-CoV-2 IgG at the first epidemic peak in French Guiana, July 2020

Abstract

Background: While Latin America has been heavily affected by the pandemic, only a few seroprevalence studies have been conducted there during the first epidemic wave in the first half of 2020.

Methodology/principal findings: A cross-sectional survey was performed between 15 July 2020 and 23 July 2020 among individuals who visited 4 medical laboratories or 5 health centers for routine screening or clinical management, with the exception of symptomatic suggestive cases of covid-19. Samples were screened for the presence of anti-SARS-CoV-2 IgG directed against domain S1 of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein using the anti-SARS-CoV-2 enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) from Euroimmun.

Conclusions/significance: The overall seroprevalence was 15.4% [9.3%-24.4%] among 480 participants, ranging from 4.0% to 25.5% across the different municipalities. The seroprevalence did not differ according to gender (p = 0.19) or age (p = 0.51). Among SARS-CoV-2 positive individuals, we found that 24.6% [11.5%-45.2%] reported symptoms consistent with COVID-19. Our findings revealed high levels of infection across the territory but a low number of resulting deaths, which can be explained by French Guiana's young population structure.

Fig 1. Map of French Guiana with municipal population size and recruitment centers, Geodata source: BD ortho, publicly available at https://www.data.gouv.fr/; QGIS 2.18 software.

Fig 2. Survey period and temporal evolution of the number of laboratory-confirmed cases, Source SI-DEP, publicly available at https://www.data.gouv.fr/en/datasets.

Fig 3. Spatial distribution of SARS-CoV-2 seroprevalence, July, French Guiana; Geodata source: BD ortho, publicly available at https://www.data.gouv.fr/; QGIS 2.18 software.