Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Covid-19: the harms of exaggerated information and non‐evidence‐based measures

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

391–400 of 462 posts

Re: Covid-19: the harms of exaggerated information and non‐evidence‐based measures

#391

Post by leereeves »

Symmetry wrote: post #370
leereeves wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On Friday, March 20, The Atlantic said over 100,000 people in the US have been tested.[1] More recently, Mike Pence said 250,000 people have been tested. We're a few days away from Korea's testing capability, if we haven't already matched it. I think southeast Asia in general handles pandemics better. The people know how to respond and do so more quickly than Americans. Wearing masks, not going on spring break, etc.…

300 tests per million people is much, much better than we were a week before that.. But South Korea is at 6,000. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/covid19-tests-per-million...

Those are old numbers. Roche alone is sending out 400k test kits per week (over 1000 per million people).[1]

According to [2], more than 290,000 Americans have been tested for the coronavirus (close to 1000 per million people) and in Washington and New York, over 3000 people per million have been tested.

What is South Korea's testing capability (tests per week)? They've had several weeks to get a lead in absolute number of tests performed, but if they've only done 6000 per million people in all that time, we've probably matched them in testing capability.

1: https://diagnostics.roche.com/us/en/news-listing/2020/roche-...

2: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/one-map-shows-how-many-cor...

Re: Covid-19: the harms of exaggerated information and non‐evidence‐based measures

#392

Post by gindely »

mschuster91 wrote: post #332
jwhite wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think SK's numbers are becoming more reliable by the day though. The new case rate has stabilised to a small number in the range of 50 to 150 per day and the active case count is dropping at a rate of over 200 per day. The daily death rate has been below 10 the whole time I believe. If that trend continues then SK's CFR will be well known soon and I would guess not dissimilar to current estimates. Though it's alway…

> Their pipeline is very full, agreed I wouldn't want to make a prediction there. German here. I assume the recent hard lockdowns will work out pretty much for us... I'm more worried about the US, this is gonna be a mass die-off, and the Trump government's handling of the issue is... let's say abysmal.

German resident here. Why do you assume the recent hard lockdowns will work out? I have discovered in my time here that the German reputation for orderliness and rule following is exaggerated.

South Korea coped with the outbreak by having a test early, test often strategy, but the German strategy seems to be test eventually, test perfectly. That means that there isn't any process to flag essential workers and others as needing a good proper test. Korea's showed it's better to do a test with a high false positive and even a significant false negative many times a day and get the person out of circulation awaiting an accurate test, than to wait for them to find the symptoms concerning and ask for a proper test.

China coped with the outbreak by having actual curfews. Major lockdowns. The sort we couldn't reasonably expect. When I went to do my weekly/fortnightly shopping yesterday, I saw several police officers looking around into restaurants and on the local town square. Not hard to hide from. No-one cared what my business was.

Italy still hasn't really peaked. They did this test-free lock down strategy that Germany is doing. Apparently the amount of intercourse required for viral transmission is ridiculously low.

There's already tens of thousands of sick people here, and the government was very lethargic in their response. The peak will be huge. As I mentioned before, they gave up after Gangelt and seemed to act as if the whole thing would be minor. It took weeks after discovering a major problem existed that needed hard work before German authorities actually agreed to do hard work.

Learning lessons seems to be really hard for authorities at the moment, and I'm genuinely worried. It's like even ideas are subject to the European protectionism - better import a bad idea from Italy than an effective one from South Korea. My goal is to not get ill before there's space in the hospitals again, because any other goal seems unrealistic.

Re: Covid-19: the harms of exaggerated information and non‐evidence‐based measures

#393

Post by kgwgk »

seppel wrote: post #386
kgwgk wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what it's worth, South Korea has 9k confirmed cases after performing 349k tests.

Super interesting. So, 2.5% of the tests are positive. I heard (it think somewhere else here) that in Germany it is 3%.

Has Germany performed one million tests already?

Re: Covid-19: the harms of exaggerated information and non‐evidence‐based measures

#395

Post by [deleted] »

defen wrote: post #93
robocat wrote: post #84

Firstly, there is 10 weeks of evidence on what other countries have done to avoid transmission. Taiwan, Vietnam, South Korea, China, and Japan all show a variety of strategies and have some successes under their belts. Sure, it’s messy social data, and they have systematic differences from other countries, but it’s real data about what is working. Ioannidis says: “If we assume that case fatality rate among individual…

> “If we assume that case fatality rate among individuals infected by SARS-CoV-2 is 0.3% in the general population — a mid-range guess from my Diamond Princess analysis — and that 1% of the U.S. population gets infected (about 3.3 million people), this would translate to about 10,000 deaths.” Why would we use the Diamond Princess CFR instead of China's, or Italy's, or South Korea's? Where does the idea of 1% come fro…

[deleted]

Re: Covid-19: the harms of exaggerated information and non‐evidence‐based measures

#396

Post by dnautics »

jacobolus wrote: post #257
dnautics wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also possible that Italy is vastly unlucky for some generic reason, considering most of the deaths are in a particular region of the country and among an age bracket that is less cosmopolitan and more likely to reflect limited geographic genetic dispersion.

I suppose central China, northern Italy, Iran, Spain, the rest of Italy, and soon enough France, Germany, New York City, Israel, followed by plenty of other places just happen to be vastly unlucky for “some generic reason”.

The cfr in those areas is not even close. It seems NYC has one of the lowest cfrs in the us.

Re: Covid-19: the harms of exaggerated information and non‐evidence‐based measures

#397

Post by Kye »

defen wrote: post #93
robocat wrote: post #84

Firstly, there is 10 weeks of evidence on what other countries have done to avoid transmission. Taiwan, Vietnam, South Korea, China, and Japan all show a variety of strategies and have some successes under their belts. Sure, it’s messy social data, and they have systematic differences from other countries, but it’s real data about what is working. Ioannidis says: “If we assume that case fatality rate among individual…

> “If we assume that case fatality rate among individuals infected by SARS-CoV-2 is 0.3% in the general population — a mid-range guess from my Diamond Princess analysis — and that 1% of the U.S. population gets infected (about 3.3 million people), this would translate to about 10,000 deaths.” Why would we use the Diamond Princess CFR instead of China's, or Italy's, or South Korea's? Where does the idea of 1% come fro…

One possible outcome for survivors is losing up to 30% of their lung capacity.

Re: Covid-19: the harms of exaggerated information and non‐evidence‐based measures

#398

Post by easytiger »

rimliu wrote: post #376
im3w1l wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So the situation is either that Italy is vastly underestimating cases, or Germany and South Korea have lost a magnitude of corpses somewhere. There is a third possibility. False positive tests: Germany and South Korea may have less cases than they think they do.

And the fourth: there were claims that only 12% Italy's COVID-19 deaths can be directly attributed to COVID-19.

interesting. this sounds reasonable given its "deaths of people who tested +ve for cv19" and not "deaths of people from complications caused by cv19"

Have you got a source?

Re: Covid-19: the harms of exaggerated information and non‐evidence‐based measures

#399

Post by gindely »

lankin wrote: post #371
411111111111111 wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually South Korea is a perfect place to look for a nation which kept it under control. Germany just lost control last week, so I expect a lot more death starting next week. Hopefully Germany's plan of isolation will reduce the spread enough, but we will see...

German here. Could you elaborate how we lost control last week? At least in Bavaria everything seems to be ok - considering the circumstances...

Isn't it the circumstances that are being considered, that are the problem? Germany "lost control" of the pandemic. (Germany didn't actually lose control last week, it's just the numbers stopped growing fast in the "ho hum" range and started growing fast in the "I'm scared" range. This is how exponential growth works. Germany lost control when they decided to do nothing for two weeks after noticing community spread.)

Re: Covid-19: the harms of exaggerated information and non‐evidence‐based measures

#400

Post by greedo »

antpls wrote: post #210
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Corvid 19 deaths are doubling every 3 days in US and a few other countries. Do the extrapolation.

Even in Italy, the National Health Institute said that 88% of the declared "dead by covid19" had in fact at least 1 or 2 other pre-morbidities. If a 80 years old dies from heart attack and is tested positive by covid19, it will count as "dead by covid19". The numbers we see in the news of "CFR" for the covid19 are, in my opinion, inaccurate. The number only shows the spread of the infection, not its actual fatality r…

Doctors are also reporting that patients who seem to be improving are suddenly arresting due to the virus. So counting those victims as "dead by covid19" seems to be correct.
Post reply on HN