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Covid-19 at a homeless shelter in Boston: Implications for universal testing

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Re: Covid-19 at a homeless shelter in Boston: Implications for universal testing

#61

Post by TSiege »

dajohnson89 wrote: post #32
credit_guy wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My bet is that it's much more than 10%. In NYC I think it's at least 20%-30% by now. Obviously, I don't have any more data than what you can find online, but anecdotally, I think one of my sons had it; he most likely got it from his piano teacher who exhibited all the Covid symptoms (fever, dry cough, loss of smell), but was never tested. I think at least myself and my wife got this from him as well; likely his two s…

brooklyn resident here. fwiw (not much), it feels like easily 1/3 of the local people i know got some mild fever symptoms in the same 3-week timespan.

Also from bk. I'll anecdotally second this sentiment. I even got sick with a terrible cough for 2 weeks in the end of February and lost my sense of smell for 2-3 days. My roommate didn't get sick, but I just spoke to my neighbors and they mentioned similar symptoms the week after me.

Re: Covid-19 at a homeless shelter in Boston: Implications for universal testing

#62

Post by abarringer »

cgb223 wrote: post #52
jlmorton wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We already have lots of data that says this is not true. For instance, on the Diamond Princess, widespread testing of a confined group initially found many asymptomatic infections, but the majority of those turned out to be pre-symptomatic, not asymptomatic. Longer term follow-up found ~25% of infections were asymptomatic. In the US, we're now doing significant amounts of testing, but we're still primarily testing on…

> In the US, we're now doing significant amounts of testing, but we're still primarily testing only those with severe symptoms Its not a significant amount of testing if we're only testing those with severe symptoms Here in SF at least there are scores of people I know who all were sick with a "weird flu" at some point from February to now who would all kill for a test to show that they have COVID immunity. These are…

Only way I know to get any COVID19 antibody test is through this study https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04334954?term=serosur... and the result may be inconclusive or take months.

Re: Covid-19 at a homeless shelter in Boston: Implications for universal testing

#63

Post by Alex3917 »

jcp2fa wrote: post #6

> Cough (7.5%), shortness of breath (1.4%), and fever (0.7%) were all uncommon among COVID-positive individuals It seems the more important point here is that the majority of the COVID-positive individuals were asymptomatic, putting another datapoint towards the conclusion that there are orders of magnitude more people that have this disease than have tested positive. We need more studies to gather data on these asym…

> Imagine if 10+% of the population already had COVID and where immune

By some estimates we need over 80% of the population to get it in order to achieve herd immunity, so if only 10% of the population has it we're not very close at all to this being over.

Re: Covid-19 at a homeless shelter in Boston: Implications for universal testing

#64

Post by IAmEveryone »

jcp2fa wrote: post #6

> Cough (7.5%), shortness of breath (1.4%), and fever (0.7%) were all uncommon among COVID-positive individuals It seems the more important point here is that the majority of the COVID-positive individuals were asymptomatic, putting another datapoint towards the conclusion that there are orders of magnitude more people that have this disease than have tested positive. We need more studies to gather data on these asym…

> Imagine if 10+% of the population already had COVID and where immune, we'd be much closer to heard immunity than we currently think.

We’d be about 1/7 the way there. Meaning we’d see another 6x current deaths to get through this. That’s not even close to acceptable.

And the 10% aren’t realistic, anyway. At least nationally. Assuming nationwide rates of 10%, then scaling up by death numbers, would put infection rates far above 100% in New York.

Re: Covid-19 at a homeless shelter in Boston: Implications for universal testing

#65

Post by jsnell »

gridlockd wrote: post #51
jlmorton wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We already have lots of data that says this is not true. For instance, on the Diamond Princess, widespread testing of a confined group initially found many asymptomatic infections, but the majority of those turned out to be pre-symptomatic, not asymptomatic. Longer term follow-up found ~25% of infections were asymptomatic. In the US, we're now doing significant amounts of testing, but we're still primarily testing on…

If you already have severe symptoms the PCR test from a throat sample is likely to give a false negative. The BPR is estimated from the known cases, so it cannot tell you anything about a hypothetical large number of unknown cases. Antibody tests in a recent German study of households gave 15% infection rate.

It wasn't a study of representative German households, but just those in a Gangelt. A small town that was basically the ground zero for the epidemic in Germany. Those numbers do not generalize to Germany as a whole, let alone other countries.

Also, the particular antibody tests they used appears to have a much higher FP rate than they claimed. Another study found 4% FPs rather than <1% like the press release for the Gangelt testing claimed.

Re: Covid-19 at a homeless shelter in Boston: Implications for universal testing

#66

Post by beamatronic »

cgb223 wrote: post #52
jlmorton wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We already have lots of data that says this is not true. For instance, on the Diamond Princess, widespread testing of a confined group initially found many asymptomatic infections, but the majority of those turned out to be pre-symptomatic, not asymptomatic. Longer term follow-up found ~25% of infections were asymptomatic. In the US, we're now doing significant amounts of testing, but we're still primarily testing on…

> In the US, we're now doing significant amounts of testing, but we're still primarily testing only those with severe symptoms Its not a significant amount of testing if we're only testing those with severe symptoms Here in SF at least there are scores of people I know who all were sick with a "weird flu" at some point from February to now who would all kill for a test to show that they have COVID immunity. These are…

Go do the Stanford drive-through blood antibody tests. It takes five minutes it’s free and they do it for everybody.

Re: Covid-19 at a homeless shelter in Boston: Implications for universal testing

#67

Post by gnulinux »

autokad wrote: post #39
raphlinus wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. We know from genomic analysis [1] that "The common ancestor of circulating viruses appears to have emerged in Wuhan, China, in late Nov or early Dec 2019." It's fun to speculate about other possibilities, but I personally like to stick to what the science tells us. [1]: https://twitter.com/nextstrain/status/1248707010750640128

well, google coronavirus searches in China, specifically Hubei province, spiked in September of 2019. Science is a term being twisted out of its original context. if people keep doing that, its going to be a pejorative.

How is Google searches relevant here? Was the news of possible coronovirus outbreak leaked to the public?

Also, do you have a source?

Re: Covid-19 at a homeless shelter in Boston: Implications for universal testing

#68

Post by gns24 »

gridlockd wrote: post #51
jlmorton wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We already have lots of data that says this is not true. For instance, on the Diamond Princess, widespread testing of a confined group initially found many asymptomatic infections, but the majority of those turned out to be pre-symptomatic, not asymptomatic. Longer term follow-up found ~25% of infections were asymptomatic. In the US, we're now doing significant amounts of testing, but we're still primarily testing on…

If you already have severe symptoms the PCR test from a throat sample is likely to give a false negative. The BPR is estimated from the known cases, so it cannot tell you anything about a hypothetical large number of unknown cases. Antibody tests in a recent German study of households gave 15% infection rate.

It's worth noting that the German study in Gangelt was done because it was considered a hot-spot - this wasn't an attempt to estimate the infection rate across the country. It does however demonstrate that even in places where lots of people have had it, herd immunity still looks a long way off.

Re: Covid-19 at a homeless shelter in Boston: Implications for universal testing

#69

Post by joshypants »

Lots of comments here about what this means for asymptomatic spread amongst the housed population.

Is it too obvious to be said that the government needs to house homeless people in hotels immediately, and that group shelters are going to get people killed? 62 comments as of writing and no one is talking about unhoused people as if they are worth considering for their own sake.

Re: Covid-19 at a homeless shelter in Boston: Implications for universal testing

#70

Post by arcticfox »

duxup wrote: post #43
DenisM wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

False positive rate of some antibody tests is 9%, which makes any effect size below that invisible.

Jebus, 9% false positive ... is that even useful?

I mean, it's not great, but imagine if it was so cheap and fast we could test the entire population on a consistent basis.

In a hypothetical scenario of 1% of the population actually having COVID and 9% testing false positive, you could ask all 10 positive results to self-quarantine and that'd probably be a pretty effective way of shutting down the virus without asking the whole population to stay home.

Once the virus spreads more, it gets even more reasonable. (If it gets crushed more and there are very few cases, it does get a little extreme to call it useful though).

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