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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

#141

Post by cgb223 »

halliburton wrote: post #139
notJim wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These are people who could potentially go back into society Do we know this for sure? I've read that we're seeing re-infections of people who previously had it, but it wasn't clear exactly what was happening.

we don't. he is (perhaps unknowingly) spreading disinformation, but that's really very normal behavior. the hardest thing about this is finding real information and then accepting it.

Accusing someone of “spreading disinformation”

Is a pretty hard line to take when all the facts are evolving and we’re learning more every day

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

#142

Post by snewman »

dr_dshiv wrote: post #80
smallgovt wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We need more studies to gather data on these asymptomatic cases if we want to reopen the economy soon. I don't understand what's so hard about measuring population infection rate. Assuming the population infection rate is between 1-10%, we would only need to do around ~500 randomized tests to achieve a 95% confidence interval of +/- 1%. For example, let's say we tested 500 random NYC residents for COVID and found t…

Amen. The whole scenario seems like a bad statistics lesson. Happy to change my mind -- but there simply hasn't been any effort to use population testing in this way -- which is one of the only useful forms of testing. Otherwise, why test people in the hospital? It doesn't change treatment. Finding asymptomatics is actually useful -- and random sampling seems critical for understanding whether we are simply fucked or…

Agreed generally, but my understanding is that testing people in the hospital does have value. Just for one example, if you're negative, then you can be placed in a non-Covid wing (otherwise you're liable to catch the coronavirus on top of whatever flu or whatever you actually have), staff don't need to use precious PPE when treating you, etc.

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

#143

Post by blhack »

abarringer wrote: post #62
cgb223 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

This is weird to hear because there are several competing clinics in Phoenix all offering antibody testing.

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

#144

Post by bgorman »

ben_w wrote: post #41
bgorman wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing you are missing is world governments want to milk this crisis, not act objectively. There is simply no other explanation.

Another explanation is that the exact infection level isn’t important when the observed all-causes fatality rate is double [0] its seasonal average and everyone is therefore busy firefighting the immediate and obvious problems. [0] varies by region, but see for example this graph of London: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EVlO-28XQAA30xu?format=jpg&name=...

Don't take my word for it.

Here is an article by a Stanford epidemiologist calling for random testing a month ago: https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/17/a-fiasco-in-the-making-a...

We need data to act objectively. As far as I can tell US state governments are doing all they can to prevent random data from being released.

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

#145

Post by autokad »

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.

to respond to everyone at once: I didnt include the link because this is public knowledge anyone can access. It was provided below but the original search doesnt work anymore. it literally worked till today. I do have a picture of it I had taken, but HN doesnt provide the ability to share pictures.

It was a search for 'coronavirus' in china between 8/1/2019 and 01/01/2020. It showed a spike of 100 on September, 21, 2019 and another in December of 2019. However, this search no longer works. All of the traffic came from Hubei Province.

what gnulinux said about '90' searches is wrong. This is 'Google Trends is a search trends feature that shows how frequently a given search term is entered into Google's search engine relative to the site's total search volume over a given period of time.'

IAmEveryone comments are just all wrong. this doesnt mean 'it would have had to been public knowledge'. It means searches on google were performed on that term, specifically in Hubei Province. and yes, google is 'blocked' in china. That doesnt mean its not used there, just less often.

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

#146

Post by pm_me_ur_fullz »

MaulingMonkey wrote: post #125
pm_me_ur_fullz wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is that the most preposterous hypothesis that doesn't warrant any review? We have no reliable antibody tests, and then won't give the unreliable ones people because they are so rare. So where does the confidence come from that we can rule out this possibility? What if this is already the "second wave". Something with lower symptoms wouldn't have warranted checking for a new strain, complications and deaths would…

> Why is that the most preposterous hypothesis that doesn't warrant any review? It's not. What is preposterous is advancing the hypothesis without any meaningful evidence, to the detrement of more useful topics, or even useful discussion of the same topic. It's one thing to be an epidemiologist saying "hey, let's see how we can double check the exact origins of this", which is a potentially useful line of inquery. It…

People don't advance a hypothesis without enough anecdotes to say "look over there"

People like you can help fill gaps of savants saying "this isn't a constructive methodology but it isn't inherently without merit" versus "I don't want to believe that because thats not consensus right now" versus "hm thats interesting maybe worth a look sometime before the 2022 congressional committee to fund the epidemiologists?"

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

#147

Post by stetrain »

kevingadd wrote: post #136
stetrain wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Milk it by tanking GDP? I'm sure that will do well for government revenue this year. I'm sure Trump was just itching to shut down international travel, recommend reduced productivity, and mail everyone checks. He just needed a good excuse.

Sending out checks is pretty popular with voters, which is why he's insisting on having his personal signature on them in an election year.

I'm just not clear on which government is chomping at the bit to cause a recession given an excuse.

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

#148

Post by guscost »

drtillberg wrote: post #7
rb808 wrote: post #4

Also 15% of pregnant Moms in NYC had the virus. This could already be much more widely spread that people think. https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/nyc-hospital-finds-hig...

The Boston Globe this morning ran an op-ed advocating testing a random sample of residents to get a better sense of community-wide infection rates.[1] It's amazing that this needed to be stated in a major market newspaper four weeks after most business and school was stopped due to the virus. Goverent is doing some interesting things, random sampling apparently isn't one of them, for reasons it's hard to understand.…

The idea that nobody has thought to do them seems absurd. I'm getting more and more suspicious the longer we see no results from randomized studies in US cities - it's getting more and more likely that either the tests are turning out to be inaccurate, or the results are turning out to be problematic.

But either way folks are probably being very careful because the results will have significant impact.

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

#149

Post by paganel »

_euac wrote: post #128
wutbrodo wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The Diamond Princess likely had a very atypical (older) population than the general population though. This would dovetail with the fact that places like sub-Saharan Africa and India haven't been hit very hard yet; they also happen to be _very_ young compared to Western countries.

I don't know if people are aware of this, but there's an increasing suspicion that countries still using the BCG vaccine for tuberculosis might be seeing [1]way lower infection rates. If that's the case, it'd explain why developed countries are bearing the brunt of the pandemic. A very interesting example of similarly developed countries with comparable (but not equal) populations and population density, but differen…

Thanks for the 4th link, I couldn't really understand the really sad images and videos coming out of Guayaquil (Ecuador) when comparing them to the rest of South America. Apart from Buenos Aires there are also big metropolises like Sao Paulo or Rio de Janeiro where you couldn't see the same things that were happening in Guayaquil. That vaccination map for South America partly explained the difference for me, at least by correlation.

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

#150

Post by Retric »

usaar333 wrote: post #75
MiguelVieira wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Likewise, South Korea reports a fatality rate of about 2% https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/south-kore... Since they have coronavirus relatively under control and have been doing extensive testing and contact tracing for months, it's plausible that they've caught most cases. It's wishful thinking to believe the infection fatality rate is an order of magnitude lower.

It is not plausible they caught most cases. Here's the result of randomized testing in Iceland, which also has the virus under control and has done even more testing per capita ( https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2006100?query=fe... ) Randomized testing was still finding 0.6% of the population (outside those otherwise quarantined already) actively infected. This means even in Iceland, less than half of infe…

South Korea cases peaked 45 days ago, Iceland peaked 2 weeks ago so their CFR are not directly comparable. Compare Iceland with a South Korea at a similar point post peak infections and the CFR look similar. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coronavirus_pandemic_in_S... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coronavirus_pandemic_in_I...

South Korea had 5 deaths per day on both 2/29 and 4/13 that’s a horrible sign.

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