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 and COVID pandemic), caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), began with an disease outbreak, outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China, in December ...

Gangelt Gangelt is a municipality in the Heinsberg (district), district of Heinsberg, in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. It is on the border with the Netherlands and about 10 km east of Sittard and 10 km south-west of Heinsberg. Its most well ...

. The study was commissioned and is co-financed by the government of

North Rhine-Westphalia North Rhine-Westphalia or North-Rhine/Westphalia, commonly shortened to NRW, is a States of Germany, state () in Old states of Germany, Western Germany. With more than 18 million inhabitants, it is the List of German states by population, most ...

and is led by

Hendrik Streeck Hendrik Streeck (born 7 August 1977 in Göttingen) is a German researcher of human immunodeficiency virus, epidemiologist and clinical trialist. He is professor of virology and the director of the Institute of Virology and HIV Research at the Un ...

. In the

public sphere The public sphere () is an area in social relation, social life where individuals can come together to freely discuss and identify societal problems, and through that discussion, Social influence, influence political action. A "Public" is "of or c ...

, the marketing agency StoryMachine presented its results on

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and

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. 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 term ...

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 ...

SARS-CoV-2 Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS‑CoV‑2) is a strain of coronavirus that causes COVID-19, the respiratory illness responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic. The virus previously had the Novel coronavirus, provisional nam ...

; it also estimated the number of unrecorded cases. Despite the fact that

sample size Sample size determination or estimation 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 abo ...

does not determine the

representativeness The representativeness heuristic is used when making judgments about the probability of an event being representational in character and essence of a known prototypical event. It is one of a group of heuristics (simple rules governing judgment or d ...

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 list of specialized agencies of the United Nations, specialized agency of the United Nations which coordinates responses to international public health issues and emergencies. It is headquartered in Gen ...

, 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 that covers the natural sciences, including physics, chemistry, earth sciences, medic ...

in November 2020, the authors had not revised their calculation.

References

COVID-19 pandemic in Germany German medical research Health policy in Germany {{COVID-19-stub