Fairly unbiased test finds just 0.72% of baseball employees in US have had COVID, by Steve Sailer.

The Stanford team that has been arguing since March that the American populace is closer to herd immunity than you might think has done a new survey of coronavirus antibodies in the blood to measure percentage ever infected. This time, however, to their surprise and disappointment, they came up with a quite small number when they measured 5,603 people linked to Major League Baseball, an enterprise/industry that is widely distributed around North America, with stadiums typically downtown but with players and staff generally living in the suburbs. Of the 30 major league franchises, 26 participated. …

…that’s only 1200 big league ballplayers at most. So most of the testees were not big league players but were white collar office workers, coaches, grounds crews, etc etc. …

Employees of Major League Baseball are not randomly representative of the US population, of course. But on the other hand, you can picture who they are in your head and probably not be too far off. Baseball and movie theaters are useful toy industries for analysis because there is a lot of data readily available about them. …

The researchers announced an estimated positive rate of 0.72% after adjusting the results for what they said were false positives and false negatives. …

Lead researcher Jay Bhattacharya, professor of medicine at Stanford.. said he expected a larger positive rate.

“The epidemic has not gotten very far,” he said. “We have quite a way to go.”

The researchers in the Major League Baseball study noted their participants were not representative of the population as a whole: 95% under the age of 65, 80% white, 60% male and 100% employed.

Every time a somewhat unbiased survey is done — rather than suggesting sick people come forward to be tested, which scares off people who know they haven’t got it — we find that herd immunity in western countries is a long way off.