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Coronavirus clue? Most cases aboard U.S. aircraft carrier are symptom-free

reuters.com

41–50 of 544 posts

Re: Coronavirus clue? Most cases aboard U.S. aircraft carrier are symptom-free

#41
post #35

All the data points to the fact that coronavirus is more widespread and less deadly than most outlets are reporting (after all, increase the denominator, the % goes down). The countries with the lowest death rates are also the countries that did the most comprehensive testing. Ditto for this aircraft carrier. Of course governments and outlets are fearmongering lest they be accused of not doing enough, but this thing…

Are you of the opinion that this is simply just a slightly worse flu?

> All the data points to the fact that coronavirus is more widespread and less deadly than most outlets are reporting

You couldn't be more wrong. There are nurses and doctors working on the front lines dealing with patients, and they're completely and utterly overloaded. Lack of resources. Lack of help from local and federal governments. They're the ones telling us this is way more deadly than it seems.

Re: Coronavirus clue? Most cases aboard U.S. aircraft carrier are symptom-free

#42
post #25
post #4

I find this to be good even excellent news. It is quite possible the virus is not nearly as dangerous and lethal as people fear. If the young have nothing to worry about the prospects are pretty good. The best way to reach herd immunity is to have lots of immune people around you.

The US military is not a representative sample of people; it's a bunch of people with better health and fitness than the general population. And the military is an institution that will reject people from joining based on a lot of the health conditions that make COVID-19 more dangerous to them. It's useful data, to be sure, but it also highlights that the disease can be really dangerous for people outside certain gro…

> It's not at all clear yet that recovering from COVID-19 confers any lasting immunity.

Coronaviruses aren't new...

Re: Coronavirus clue? Most cases aboard U.S. aircraft carrier are symptom-free

#43
post #10

This is mixed news. While this indicates the death rate may be lower and the infection rate higher among the general population, the demographic of individuals in the US military are going to be of significantly higher health than the general population. So, it doesn't necessarily ease the risk for demographics already identified as 'at-risk'. If anything, their risk might be understated given the higher infection ra…

Especially once you consider all of the pre-existing conditions that make you ineligible to be in the military.

I think we should also consider that some members of the military depending on their duties get exposed to chemicals that the civilian pop don’t get exposed to at the same levels.

Re: Coronavirus clue? Most cases aboard U.S. aircraft carrier are symptom-free

#44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not so sure that's clear yet. Just going on blunt metrics, the virus has already killed 0.1% of NYC's entire population, probably on pace to hit 0.2% if the down-curve even only roughly matches the up-curve. So it would have had to have spread to 50% of the population for the fatality rate there to be only 0.4%, which seems unlikely (there's only a smattering of antibody data around the world so far but nothing h…

When you include 3,700 non-positive deaths in your total death count, yeah - the numbers look scary. The reporting we're seeing is CFR, not mortality rate. They are very different things. Mortality rate is the number of deaths caused by a disease. CFR (Case Fatality Rate) is the total number of deaths by those diagnosed with a disease. They are very different numbers, and have very different meaning for different ana…

Even w/o those non-positives, the death count for NYC is in the neighborhood of 8,000[0] (and still rising at a decent clip) for a population of 8 million. That's 0.1%.

You can also look at individual counties[1] and you get some variation but the same picture. Ex. 2.7k deaths in Queens for a population of 2.3mil, 0.4k deaths in Richmond for a population of 0.4mil

(That's 0.1% for the entire population and not even nearing the maximum yet, so obviously the IFR's and CFR's will be even higher.)

[0]https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/doh/downloads/pdf/imm/covid-19-d... [1]https://covid19tracker.health.ny.gov/views/NYS-COVID19-Track...

Re: Coronavirus clue? Most cases aboard U.S. aircraft carrier are symptom-free

#45
post #4

I find this to be good even excellent news. It is quite possible the virus is not nearly as dangerous and lethal as people fear. If the young have nothing to worry about the prospects are pretty good. The best way to reach herd immunity is to have lots of immune people around you.

When we find out obese, smokers, asthma, were considering themselves "healthy" and not "at risk", it will explain a lot.

Until then it seems day drinking has gone up, suicide, and home abuse has gone up.

All because there's a 20% increased survival if you can be put on a ventilator. Flattening the curve may have some unintended consequences.

My kid couldn't get his surgery in all of this..

Re: Coronavirus clue? Most cases aboard U.S. aircraft carrier are symptom-free

#46
post #10

This is mixed news. While this indicates the death rate may be lower and the infection rate higher among the general population, the demographic of individuals in the US military are going to be of significantly higher health than the general population. So, it doesn't necessarily ease the risk for demographics already identified as 'at-risk'. If anything, their risk might be understated given the higher infection ra…

Especially once you consider all of the pre-existing conditions that make you ineligible to be in the military.

Good point, yes, but I bet that Gulf war soldiers where also extra-healthy when they enlisted. Not so much when they returned home.

Army, is an activity with lots of health risks, chemicals and strange diseases exposure attached. Not the best choice if you expect to live for one hundred years.

Re: Coronavirus clue? Most cases aboard U.S. aircraft carrier are symptom-free

#47
post #35

All the data points to the fact that coronavirus is more widespread and less deadly than most outlets are reporting (after all, increase the denominator, the % goes down). The countries with the lowest death rates are also the countries that did the most comprehensive testing. Ditto for this aircraft carrier. Of course governments and outlets are fearmongering lest they be accused of not doing enough, but this thing…

Are you of the opinion that this is simply just a slightly worse flu? > All the data points to the fact that coronavirus is more widespread and less deadly than most outlets are reporting You couldn't be more wrong. There are nurses and doctors working on the front lines dealing with patients, and they're completely and utterly overloaded. Lack of resources. Lack of help from local and federal governments. They're th…

> Are you of the opinion that this is simply just a slightly worse flu?

I mean I'm about 95% sure I already had it. Had literally every single symptom but the local health authority (Alberta, Canada) wouldn't test me. My SO had it worse but again, they wouldn't test her.

Felt like a worse flu + more coughing and shortness of breath. Worse fever. My symptoms were bad for about 3 days, then felt like a cold for about a week, then a cough stuck around another week or two after. My SO had bad symptoms for about a week, was moderately sick for another week and a bit, but her symptoms disappeared pretty quickly afterwards. In either case, because we didn't require hospitalisation, AHS wouldn't test us.

Anyhow, there's a massive body of evidence that there's many times more people infected than confirmed cases. Are you disputing that? Do you actually think there is no one infected other than confirmed cases?

Our health authority, until a few days ago, wouldn't test anyone that wasn't a severe case or an at-risk group... You could literally have every single symptom and they'd simply tell you to stay home. Now they've only expanded testing because there's way less hospitalisations than their models predicted...

Edit

> There are nurses and doctors working on the front lines dealing with patients, and they're completely and utterly overloaded. Lack of resources. Lack of help from local and federal governments.

Maybe that's a failing of your health care system? In Canada hospitalisation rates are way less than predicted. Our province also gave away a bunch of PPE because it doesn't appear as though they'll get used.

Edit 2 - described more symptoms

Re: Coronavirus clue? Most cases aboard U.S. aircraft carrier are symptom-free

#48
post #10

This is mixed news. While this indicates the death rate may be lower and the infection rate higher among the general population, the demographic of individuals in the US military are going to be of significantly higher health than the general population. So, it doesn't necessarily ease the risk for demographics already identified as 'at-risk'. If anything, their risk might be understated given the higher infection ra…

But it would indicate the we may be closer to herd immunity than we thought, which would be great news.

Re: Coronavirus clue? Most cases aboard U.S. aircraft carrier are symptom-free

#49
post #15
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if the US has 33K deaths and the death rate is 0.6% then the US must have at least 5 million cases. If the death rate is lower (most likely around 0.3%) then it means 10 million infections. Also a good news actually.

Agree, though still a long way from herd immunity, which I understand starts at 50%-ish.

Herd immunity varies by disease. A lot.

For each disease we estimate a number called R0, which is how many people the average person will transmit it to if no precautions are taken.

Herd immunity sets in when only 1/R0 people have not managed to get it.

With the flu, R0 is about 1.3. Meaning that herd immunity to a particular strain starts slowing the spread after about 1/4 of us are immune. (It can continue spreading for some time after that point.) I calculated that from the fact that 1 - 1/1.3 = 0.23076923076923076...

R0 for COVID-19 is likely around 5.6 +- 0.9 per https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.02.07.20021154v... we take the middle of that range, over 82% of us have to get it before herd immunity starts to work in our favor.

Re: Coronavirus clue? Most cases aboard U.S. aircraft carrier are symptom-free

#50

>> The majority of the positive cases so far are among sailors who are asymptomatic, officials say. I don't know much about this kind of thing, but isn't the most important word in that sentence "sailors"? I would think people living on an aircraft carrier are, on average, way different in many major ways than the average American. So it seems like making any kinds of assumptions based on this wouldn't be super relia…

I'd take issue at the use of the word 'sailor', when it's been an awfully long time since the navy used sails to get into battle...
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