Thanks, I grabbed the wrong column from my data. Either way that’s half the flu total over the same season. My point is that it isn’t unprecedented load, it’s just all at once — and additive.
If you're going to compare the deaths you need to count them in the same way, and you haven't done so here.
Well it’s fair to say that neither has the government, if anyone dies in possession of COVID they’re automatically a COVID death, pretty much even if they get hit by a truck. That’s not true of the flu is it?
The lower rate was calculated based on only 7 or 8 fatalities. Also the people in Gangelt, where that test was carried out, are significantly younger than the average German. Their share of people over 75 is 17% below the national average.
That isn't what I saw when I looked up their demographics, it looked roughly in line, skewing older even. [1] They had 12.8% over 75 as compared to for instance, 9% in Frankfurt [2]. Also in a population of 10,000-ish the number of fatalities would have to be by definition closer to 40. [1] https://www.citypopulation.de/en/germany/census/nordrhein_we... [2] https://www.citypopulation.de/en/germany/hessen/frankfurt_am…
Stanford’s study should give us more info soon. They recently screened a decent sized group in Santa Clara County to get a sense of how widespread it is, using their newly developed finger-prick test which looks for both antigens and antibodies (whether you have it / had it and recovered). Currently the test is being prioritized for frontline healthcare workers while they work on scaling up: https://www.stanforddaily…
It's been 12 days since they tested everyone. My understanding is that the results for serological tests are available right away, so I was expecting them to publish results within a few days. Any idea why they haven't yet?
Perhaps they can't get statistical significance. You'd ballpark a 0.5% infection rate in the Bay Area going by deaths and current best guesses for IFR. Your false positive rate might exceed that.
These tests are better done in highly infected areas like NYC.
If 0.37% is true, why are the hospitals in this shape?
The 2% number is 2% of people who have bad symptoms die. 0.37% is 0.37% of all people who get it, including those who have mild/no symptoms die. It simply means a much larger percentage of people get it, not that any less people are dying. I’d say there’s a good chance that many of us have gotten it, and spread it, without knowing it.
Korean testing is revealing a fatality rate of about 2% over all cases, with about 8% requiring hospitalization. You are off by an order of magnitude.
The Netherlands has 3.3k deaths vs 29k confirmed cases, which would give a CFR of ~10% I.e. the Netherlands aren't testing much. A 10x reduction there brings it back to the CFR range we see in countries with bigger testing programs. I'm not a specialist but have been following this for a while, and have yet to see evidence the IFR for this isnt around 0.5-1% (assuming decent healthcare). That's what we saw in the Dia…
Dutch testing policy is acknowledged by national bodies to not be representative at all. Moreover, so is our death rate. We have a lot of hidden deaths of elderly people who decide not to go through the trauma of an ICU stint and instead decide to die at home. I don't recall exact numbers but think it was estimated the true death toll is about 50 to 100 percent higher.
The middle part is an interesting point. A study of the first 50 hospital patients in Heinsberg (worst affected region in Germany) found that of 8 who had died, 4 had rejected ICU treatment.
Do you know any studies of the outcome of the 32 Diamond Princess patients that were the ICU at the time the boat was emptied? I have been looking and I can’t find any data on what was the final clinical outcome of all patients on the Diamond Princess?
Wiki said there have been 14 deaths so far, most recently just 3 days ago.
It seems they are only tracking the Japanese deaths. It doesn’t seem like anyone is tracking the seriously ill who were transported home, or those that became ill once they got home. Even on these incomplete number the true death rate is 2%.
If not done well PCR has an incredibly high false positive rate. If you contaminate your set up area (or equipment) with past PCR amplification material you will get a very high rate of PCR positivity. Of course if you do things correctly this shouldn’t happen, but if the average pathology lab technician is as skilled as my ex-students and colleagues (and myself) then I would be not be so keen to rule out false posit…
I am familiar with these drawbacks, having worked as a research assistant doing RT-PCR and qPCR. My understanding from a brief stint in industry is that there is a lot more quality control to be found in industrial and diagnostic labs than is typically found in a research lab. So I imagine there is still an appreciable amount of false positives even in a diagnostic lab, but they do have a lot more quality control in…
Yes normally this is the case, but when they are under immense pressure to pump through the samples we should expect the normal high standards drop.
I think that the reported numbers of deaths place some bounds on the kinds of hypotheses that are tenable, including those suggesting that there is already a protective level of herd immunity, or a vanishingly small death rate. For instance, one early hypothesis was that the virus was endemic in our population for a long time, but that doesn't explain why the death rate shot up suddenly over the past month. And 15000…
> Many of those hypotheses coincided with claims that the lockdown was unnecessary or excessive. This is it. The (short-term) financial incentives to opening up the economy are _massive_. Anyone trying to support that will jump all over some weakly supported hypothesis like this.
As are the social incentives for those of us who are lonely and bored.
A hypothetical young healthy man might be quite happy to accept 0.37% of people dying (the vast majority of whom are old and/or near death any way) if it means he doesn't have to put his life on hold for a year and can start dating again. Young males routinely take much higher risks for mating opportunities. I'm honestly surprised at the level of compliance so far, but I doubt it will last.
If you're going to compare the deaths you need to count them in the same way, and you haven't done so here.
Well it’s fair to say that neither has the government, if anyone dies in possession of COVID they’re automatically a COVID death, pretty much even if they get hit by a truck. That’s not true of the flu is it?
It seems unlikely that someone would even be tested after being hit by a truck, or that a doctor would choose to list it as a cause of death.
IMHO, this article is intentionally misleading. The incubation period is currently estimated to be 2-14 days (mean is 5.6 days per CDC, similar per WHO). The article doesn’t mention any dates or time frames, but does mention: ”Roughly 60 percent of the over 600 sailors who tested positive so far have not shown symptoms of COVID-19” — note how “so far” is ambiguous in that sentence. It also states, “The Navy’s testing…
Just as one data point, the captain of the ship raised alarms about the virus spreading late last month. So it’s not exactly a recent outbreak. Of course, without testing from that period it’s impossible to know.
The general public may have had little to no access to testing back then, but the military certainly did. They may choose not to release numbers from back then, but the limited testing capacity existed is, IMO, quite justifiably used on people in the military. There’s plenty to criticize about the country’s response but lack of testing in the military isn’t one Of them, at least not relative to the broader (lack of) availability of testing to the wider public .
