The COVID-19 Case-Cluster-Study – colloquially, Heinsberg study, also known as Heinsbergprotokoll and HEINSBERG PROTOKOLL. – is a study about the
COVID-19 pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic, also known as the coronavirus pandemic, is an ongoing global pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The novel virus was first identi ...
in
Gangelt.
The study was commissioned and is co-financed by the government of
North Rhine-Westphalia
North Rhine-Westphalia (german: Nordrhein-Westfalen, ; li, Noordrien-Wesfale ; nds, Noordrhien-Westfalen; ksh, Noodrhing-Wäßßfaale), commonly shortened to NRW (), is a state (''Land'') in Western Germany. With more than 18 million inha ...
and is led by
Hendrik Streeck. In the
public sphere
The public sphere (german: Öffentlichkeit) is an area in social life where individuals can come together to freely discuss and identify societal problems, and through that discussion influence political action. A "Public" is "of or concerning the ...
, the marketing agency
StoryMachine presented its results on
Facebook
Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Mosk ...
and
Twitter
Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...
. Private enterprises also co-financed the study. The results of the study garnered cross-national media attention.
The study aimed to determine
lethality
Lethality (also called deadliness or perniciousness) is how capable something is of causing death. Most often it is used when referring to diseases, chemical weapons, biological weapons, or their toxic chemical components. The use of this ter ...
of and
immunity
Immunity may refer to:
Medicine
* Immunity (medical), resistance of an organism to infection or disease
* ''Immunity'' (journal), a scientific journal published by Cell Press
Biology
* Immune system
Engineering
* Radiofrequence immunity desc ...
to
SARS-CoV-2
Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS‑CoV‑2) is a strain of coronavirus that causes COVID-19 (coronavirus disease 2019), the respiratory illness responsible for the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The virus previously had a ...
; it also estimated the number of unrecorded cases.
Despite the fact that
sample size
Sample size determination is the act of choosing the number of observations or replicates to include in a statistical sample. The sample size is an important feature of any empirical study in which the goal is to make inferences about a populatio ...
does not determine the
representativeness The representativeness heuristic is used when making judgments about the probability of an event under uncertainty. It is one of a group of heuristics (simple rules governing judgment or decision-making) proposed by psychologists Amos Tversky and ...
of a study, principal investigator Streeck claims, they examined more persons than recommended by the
World Health Organization
The World Health Organization (WHO) is a specialized agency of the United Nations responsible for international public health. The WHO Constitution states its main objective as "the attainment by all peoples of the highest possible level of ...
, the study would "thus be statistically absolutely representative".
Criticism
One weakness of the study was the calculation of the IFR, which represents the lethality of COVID-19. The number of deaths were counted only for a period of 14 days. Because deaths accumulate over many weeks rather than directly after the infection, the study captured barely half the related deaths. This alone meant that the IFR was almost twice as high as calculated. When the study was published in
Nature Communications
''Nature Communications'' is a peer-reviewed, open access, scientific journal published by Nature Portfolio since 2010. It is a multidisciplinary journal and it covers the natural sciences, including physics, chemistry, earth sciences, medici ...
in November 2020, the authors had not revised their calculation.
References
COVID-19 pandemic in Germany
German medical research
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