Coronavirus clue? Most cases aboard U.S. aircraft carrier are symptom-free • Hacker News Board

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

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Post by chiefalchemist » Sat, Apr 18, 2020, 1:49 AM UTC

nradov wrote: post #516

chiefalchemist wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In addition, this virus tends to prey on the weak. You don't want to have a pre-existing condition around Covid-19. If you look at the top causes of deaths in the USA in recent years then match well with C19's "favorite" targets. This instance, high blood pressure, diabetes, lung disease (e.g., COPD aka smoking), etc. The last stat I heard was 40% of USA adults have a pre-existing condition. That's a significant amou…

A study of patients in New York showed that obesity was the top chronic pre-existing condition risk factor. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.08.20057794v...

Right. And obesity is, in general, preventable. That is, C19 is a symptom. The underlying "disease" is how generally unhealthy the average citizen is.

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

#532

Post by tlavoie » Sat, Apr 18, 2020, 5:36 AM UTC

watwut wrote: post #446

xorfish wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the virus spreads exponentially, you would expect most cases to be presymptomatic at any given time.

Not when the amount of people is limited. Exponential spread in isolated group of 3000 people necessary becomes non exponential at some point.

Much like the line I picked up in my EMS days. "All bleeding will eventually stop."

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

#533

Post by vsl » Sat, Apr 18, 2020, 11:53 AM UTC

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #494

bluGill wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In most cases, but the 1918 Spanish flu famously got more deadly after a mutation, if you got it early you were better off. I'm still hoping to get it late assuming better treatment (or better yet vaccine), but I recognize there is no way to know if this is correct in this case.

The best case with mass immunity is that R drops below 0 and the virus burns itself out. The worst case is that immunity primes the body for a massive and lethal immune system overreaction if the virus returns and/or mutates. This seems to have happened in 1918, which is why the second wave was more deadly. Generally viruses seem to become less lethal over time, so this is rare and unlikely - and we'd be very unlucky…

Below 1, not 0. Below 0 would mean an infected person on average heals other infected.

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

#534

Post by lbeltrame » Sat, Apr 18, 2020, 12:24 PM UTC

henrikschroder wrote: post #521

lbeltrame wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's also starting to appear evidence that kids might not be a serious disease vector, contrary to pretty much everyone's gut feeling. This is intriguing. Any source where I can dig up further?

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2020/apr/school-closures-play-mar... "Professor Russell Viner (UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health and President of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health) said, "We know from previous studies that school closures are likely to have the greatest effect if the virus has low transmissibility and attack rates are higher in children. This is the opposite of COVID-19.""

Thanks a lot. The article had also a link to the paper, which I read. It's for sure interesting that with SARS the results were inconsistent, as opposed to flu pandemics.

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

#535

Post by robocat » Sat, Apr 18, 2020, 12:28 PM UTC

innomatics wrote: post #359

robocat wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When looking at a single region like Bergamo, the death toll is four times higher than normal... Absolutely nothing like a normal flu season spike. See graph in http://archive.is/AaJ76 If you look at the euromomo information for a country it is averaged across all regions, that includes those regions that started lockdown before severe outbreak, so the spike averages down to be small. I.e. you can’t look at the count…

Agree with your points although the link was blocked for me. Do you think that a very mild flu season could possibly have made this outbreak worse?

> link was blocked for me

That will be because you are using 1.1.1.1 for your DNS: archive.org has decided to give a bung IP to CloudFlare just because... (personally I think CloudFlare are doing the right thing here - protecting your privacy - unfortunately archive disagree. I think archive are wrong since DNS is often cached which is much the same).

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

#536

Post by azinman2 » Sat, Apr 18, 2020, 6:18 PM UTC

mabbo wrote: post #147

azinman2 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some percent of confirmed recovered cases never develop antibodies it seems.

Then how did they recover? If your body has no antibodies to the virus then why would the virus ever stop spreading within you?

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/13/who-officials-say-its-unclea...

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

#537

Post by guscost » Sat, Apr 18, 2020, 10:14 PM UTC

feral wrote: post #192

guscost wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone who actually knows this stuff would never say that it’s a matter of “simple math”, that’s absurd. Those people have not been saying that they’re sure about anything at this point, because they’re not. There’s nothing to prove you wrong yet either, of course, but let’s see how your prediction does over the next few months: between 14,400 and 80,000 deaths in Ireland.

The simple math comment was about estimating IFR, given the sampling in the Netherlands, not about the whole domain. Maybe you are saying the implied model is too crude. Perhaps, but there's a value in it's simplicity - folks can get a convincing estimate of the rough scale of the IFR, that this disease is serious, not the flu etc. > let’s see how your prediction does over the next few months: between 14,400 and 80,0…

You really think that if your numbers don't pan out, it will be because Ireland somehow suppressed this thing (put that "genie" back in the bottle as it were), and not simply because its IFR is (or became) lower than you assumed it would be?

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

#538

Post by kavalg » Sun, Apr 19, 2020, 8:47 AM UTC

officialjunk wrote: post #373

kavalg wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you say damage, do you mean permanent damage? Or maybe it is still not clear?

permanent https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/02/here-is-w...

Thanks for the link! My question was more into the direction whether permanent damage can occur in mild/asymptomatic cases and it looks like it is not the case. Anyways, if I am wrong and anyone has better information on this, please share it.

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

#539

Post by three_seagrass » Sun, Apr 19, 2020, 10:39 PM UTC

standardUser wrote: post #472

thombat wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Precisely - as an early outbreak centre that town is referred to as "Germany's Wuhan", and is expected to have among the highest proportion of infected inhabitants. So actually the 15% figure came as a disappointment and something of a surprise.

A disappointment? NYC has among the highest testing rates in the world and has only found about 1.5% of people infected. If there's another 14% in NYC that have been infected without needing medical attention, that is fantastic news.

That still doesn't change the absolute numbers of people needing medical attention though.

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

#540

Post by arcticbull » Tue, Apr 21, 2020, 8:17 AM UTC

DanBC wrote: post #448

arcticbull wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You're incorrect to say that if anyone dies with Covid-19 that they're counted as a covid-19 death. It's likely that covid-19 deaths are undercounted. Here's one example: https://ltccovid.org/2020/04/12/mortality-associated-with-co... For a while the US was only counting deaths that happened in hospitals. This argument -- that we're somehow over-counting covid-19 death -- doesn't hold because we can compare excess mo…

> You're incorrect to say that if anyone dies with Covid-19 that they're counted as a covid-19 death.

I'm not. In some countries they absolutely do count anyone who dies while in the possession of COVID as a COVID death, for instance Italy. " Italy’s death rate might also be higher because of how fatalities are recorded. In Italy, all those who die in hospitals with Coronavirus are included in the death counts."

“On re-evaluation by the National Institute of Health, only 12 per cent of death certificates have shown a direct causality from coronavirus, while 88% patients who have died have at least one pre-morbidity – many had two or three.” [1]

In New York they're not just counting speculative COVID deaths of anyone with respiratory illness even if they've never tested positive [2].

"A subtler issue is what to do when the patient has other serious medical conditions. If the person suffered from chronic lung disease, then became infected with the virus and died of pneumonia, the immediate or primary cause would be pneumonia as a result of COVID-19. The lung disease would be listed as a contributing condition, said Sally S. Aiken, president of the National Association of Medical Examiners." [3]

The CDC has guidance on this but it's fair to say its interpretation will vary from place to place. "COVID-19 should be reported on the death certificate for all decedents where the disease caused or is assumed to have caused or contributed to death" -- that's pretty broad. [4]

My understanding is a few folks who committed suicide and a few who died in car accidents due to head trauma were coded as COVID, but I can't find my source on that and I assume it's pretty limited. I wasn't being literal in my earlier comment, however, and nor should this paragraph be considered as changing or doubling-down on that. I assume such cases, if they do in fact exist would be few and far between.

Hope that helps.

I also don't think it's fair to pin 100% of excess deaths entirely on COVID. We shall see, however.

[1] https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/global-covid-19-case-fatality-...

[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/15/coronavirus-new-york-city-st...

[3] https://www.inquirer.com/health/coronavirus/coronavirus-covi...

[4] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvss/coronavirus/Alert-2-New-I...