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Covid-19 Antibody Seroprevalence in Santa Clara County, California

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Re: Covid-19 Antibody Seroprevalence in Santa Clara County, California

#191

Post by danieltillett »

Animats wrote: post #178
danieltillett wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with herd immunity to this virus is how short the immunity to corona virus is - around a year. If we wait for herd immunity to build from low level natural spread then we will never get there. There is a very major risk with extrapolating the Santa Clara data in the motivation of those being tested has not been controlled. Who is more likely to want to know they have been infected - those who have had cla…

How short the immunity to corona virus is - around a year. Source? Right now, that seems unknown - too soon to tell. A few months of measuring antibody levels and we'll know more.

This is what we know from other human corona viruses. SARS-CoV-2 could be different, but without evidence I would not want to bet on long immunity.

Re: Covid-19 Antibody Seroprevalence in Santa Clara County, California

#192

Post by notacoward »

rumanator wrote: post #29
standardUser wrote: post #19

Add this to growing pile of evidence that this coronavirus is more widespread than most testing to date would suggest. How much more widespread still appears very unclear. There is a major ramping up of antibody testing happening right now, and multiple new tests being introduced, so we should have a better idea very soon. But the takeaway should be that this is a good thing. Every unknown case we uncover decreases t…

I don't follow your argument. If the epidemic is more widespread than initially thought, why do you assume that the effective transmission rate would potentially decrease? If anything, the transmission rate was higher than assumed and, due to the higher number of infections and how they spread exponentially,it would only ramp up. And additionally, there are reports of reinfections among covid19 patients who were foun…

> there are reports of reinfections

AFAICT those reports pertain to testing positive again, not to actual reinfection. The leading hypothesis from scientists in the studies I've seen is that the tests are picking up RNA from dead virus, which will neither cause symptoms nor be transmissible to others. I certainly hope that hypothesis turns out to be the correct one, because if not we're in for even more trouble.

Re: Covid-19 Antibody Seroprevalence in Santa Clara County, California

#193

Post by BryanBigs »

mgreg wrote: post #17

There's also some data coming out of Wuhan around antibody testing. The methodology is not as well formed as the study in the OP but there is still value in the data. > Wuhan’s Zhongnan Hospital found that 2.4% of its employees and 2% to 3% of recent patients and other visitors, including people tested before returning to work, had developed antibodies, according to senior doctors there. Additional antibody testing i…

Except for people bored out of their minds, wanting to get away from their kids or spouse for an hour, etc. Also, there is an altruistic motivation - it feels like you are doing SOMETHING to help by being in this study.

Re: Covid-19 Antibody Seroprevalence in Santa Clara County, California

#194

Post by Jeema101 »

contravariant wrote: post #133
MiguelVieira wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using 0.5% for mental math, rounding down from the lower bound from this study in The Lancet: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3... I would be surprised if, after this current wave of infections, the percentage of people with antibodies in the US is higher than the low single digits. Herd immunity without a vaccine is a pipe dream. Our best bet is to massively ramp up testing and c…

Herd immunity isn't a pipe dream it is just one hell of a sacrifice. And we'd better check the immunity actually lasts before we try that. Frankly I've never been a great fan of the 'flatten the curve' explanation, sure the graphs seem nice but I reckon the peak in those graphs is drawn too low by several orders of magnitude. In the Netherlands a fatality rate of 0.5% would mean it'd take about a year for herd immuni…

One aspect that people seem to be ignoring with the whole 'healthcare capacity' argument is the mental health of the healthcare workers. The capacity everyone talks about is IMO the acute capacity, not really the chronic sustained capacity.

That's because just like in a war, it isn't realistic to expect the frontline soldiers to stay in combat for longer than weeks at a time before they start to exhibit PTSD and their effectiveness begins to drop.

Unless we have large reserves of doctors and nurses to rotate in and out I think we should be very careful not to take them for granted.

Re: Covid-19 Antibody Seroprevalence in Santa Clara County, California

#195

Post by member221 »

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Re: Covid-19 Antibody Seroprevalence in Santa Clara County, California

#196

Post by Medicalidiot »

mlyle wrote: post #179
Medicalidiot wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not going to comment on that because I have a basic understanding of public health and epidemiology on the diagnostic side of things. Why do you think that this isn't a "good" random sample?

It's not a random sample; it's a convenience sample of people who responded to Facebook ads.

What about Facebook ads doesn't mean that they're an adequate sample? Is there a confounding factor that you have in mind?

Re: Covid-19 Antibody Seroprevalence in Santa Clara County, California

#197

Post by irq11 »

JamesBarney wrote: post #163
irq11 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that a huge portion of those deaths are in places that may have already reached herd immunity, if the ratio of comfirmed / actual cases is as small as this study suggests. NYC, for example, has 123k confirmed cases. Multiply by 50, and you have 6.1M, which is close to 70% of the total population.

Where are you getting the assumption that only 1 in 50 infected are confirmed? That seems like an especially low confirmed case to infection ratio.

Directly from the article. It’s the lower-bound estimate for confirmed to infected found by the study.

You should read it before commenting.

Re: Covid-19 Antibody Seroprevalence in Santa Clara County, California

#198

Post by thu2111 »

DanBC wrote: post #190
thu2111 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not "pretty high", it's middle of the pack and nowhere near the apocalypse that was supposed to be the outcome of their chosen path.

Deaths per 1m population in Sweden is currently 139. For Denmark it's 58, and for Norway it's 30.

This is a total failure as a talking point - it's amazing how quick it's spreading. Go compare it to Italy and Spain, which have both got the most severe restrictions. In Spain children are under house arrest, yet their outcomes are much worse than Sweden.

As I said, Sweden is in the middle of the pack. Your response is not a rebuttal to that. Lockdown is meant to avoid deaths by ensuring everyone has a bed, which in Sweden they do. Beyond that death rates will diverge for other reasons - it appears Sweden is seeing large racial disparities in deaths for some reason, as is America. So as a country that took in a lot more immigrants than Norway that would by itself be a contributing factor. But deaths due to not getting hospital beds is something we can safely say isn't happening, which means the justification for the lockdown is invalidated.

I'm really uncertain why so many people are resisting this outcome. It's a good one! Lockdowns are bad! If they have no effect then that means they should end and that's great for absolutely everyone.

Re: Covid-19 Antibody Seroprevalence in Santa Clara County, California

#199

Post by zaroth »

redis_mlc wrote: post #188
zaroth wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well and I say this not even to indite China. Maybe they really and truly believed at the time there wasn’t human transmission. Maybe a virus originating in France or the US would have played out mostly the same way. (I doubt it, but that’s irrelevant) My point was just that with the information we had in December, there was no way politically to enact the extraordinary (and extraordinarily damaging) measures that wo…

Your dates are off. SARS-2 was circulating outside China in SE Asia before Dec. 15. BlueDot warned subscribers Dec. 30. WHO notification was Dec. 31. Disneyworld Shanghai was closed Jan. 24. You can't hear anything when you don't listen.

> Your dates are off.

I think not.

The Lancet reported on January 24th the Time of Onset of the earliest known patients in Wuhan in a nice graphic [0]. The first case onset in Wuhan is reported as December 1st.

"Chinese epidemiologists with the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention published an article on 20th January 2020 stating that the first cluster of (~40) patients with ‘pneumonia of an unknown cause’ had been identified on 21st December 2019". [1]

Much later, just in the last few weeks, new reports have come out trying to trace earlier possible cases of COVID. Here is one such case dating back to November 17th, in Hubei [2]. This was not known in December or January.

There is a pre-print available as of April 8th claiming to have found an earlier case through genome tracing dating as early as mid-September in Guangdong, a southern coastal province in China. [3]

> SARS-2 was circulating outside China in SE Asia before Dec. 15.

Citation needed.

My other dates are straight from the National Review, and I believe they are accurate.

The first known case in the US was discovered on January 21st.

Here is WHO writing on January 5, 2020 [4];

"On 31 December 2019, the WHO China Country Office was informed of cases of pneumonia of unknown etiology (unknown cause) detected in Wuhan City, Hubei Province of China. As of 3 January 2020, a total of 44 patients with pneumonia of unknown etiology have been reported to WHO by the national authorities in China. Of the 44 cases reported, 11 are severely ill, while the remaining 33 patients are in stable condition. According to media reports, the concerned market in Wuhan was closed on 1 January 2020 for environmental sanitation and disinfection."

I claimed that there was nothing that could have been done by the US in the December time frame, and I believe that is self-evident from the timeline. Looking at that statement from the WHO on January 5th, there is nothing in that which could possibly motivate a national quarantine response at that time. Not even in China, but certainly not in the US.

[0] - https://els-jbs-prod-cdn.jbs.elsevierhealth.com/cms/attachme...

Full Text:

(https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...)

[1] - https://bfpg.co.uk/2020/04/covid-19-timeline/

[2] - https://www.livescience.com/first-case-coronavirus-found.htm...

[3] - https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2020/04/07/2004999117

[4] - https://www.who.int/csr/don/05-january-2020-pneumonia-of-unk...

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