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California Covid-19 traffic report finds silver lining

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Re: California Covid-19 traffic report finds silver lining

#181

Post by greedo »

arcticbull wrote: post #178
greedo wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You support Sweden's model of ignoring the issue? Not only do they still have a high exponential growth rate, as well as exponentially increasing death counts, but their CFR is atrocious. Also the link in your footnote is extremely outdated, and doesn't mention anything about Sweden.

Sweden has actually leveled off and had flat new case growth over the last week [1], same as in Canada where they have shut the world down (in terms of flatness not numbers). Further CFR is almost exclusively based on age of acquisition and the extent to which hospitals are available. In Sweden hospitals are available. The disease is exactly the same everywhere so it’s much more to do with demographics. I mean they’v…

Do you even check your numbers? Sweden has over 1500 deaths to date.

Your just cherry picking numbers and extrapolating to fit your conclusions. Their CFR is 10% now. 10%. That's extraordinary. You can't dismiss their current stats and then say they don't have a genpop testing regimen as a means of supporting your claims.

And even if you get "lucky" with a crude CFR of 1%, that's disastrous. If just 50% become infected, that's 50K deaths, not 500. And another 250-500K hospitalizations with long lasting effects.

Re: California Covid-19 traffic report finds silver lining

#182

Post by arcticbull »

greedo wrote: post #181
arcticbull wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sweden has actually leveled off and had flat new case growth over the last week [1], same as in Canada where they have shut the world down (in terms of flatness not numbers). Further CFR is almost exclusively based on age of acquisition and the extent to which hospitals are available. In Sweden hospitals are available. The disease is exactly the same everywhere so it’s much more to do with demographics. I mean they’v…

Do you even check your numbers? Sweden has over 1500 deaths to date. Your just cherry picking numbers and extrapolating to fit your conclusions. Their CFR is 10% now. 10%. That's extraordinary. You can't dismiss their current stats and then say they don't have a genpop testing regimen as a means of supporting your claims. And even if you get "lucky" with a crude CFR of 1%, that's disastrous. If just 50% become infect…

(1) The books you claimed I was cooking were typos (notice they were off by one character each?). I've updated the post to reflect what I intended, so thanks for calling that out.

(2) Let's use our noodle for a sec greedo.

They haven't been attempting to control the spread of COVID, and you're telling me they only have 15,000 cases out of a population of 10,000,000 when the R0 is between 2 and 3? Do you genuinely believe that it's not a lack of proper testing? When Gangelt had a seropositive rate of 15% and Santa Clara has 2-5% previously infected?

That would make the denominator not 15,000 but 200,000-1,500,000 or 0.75% to 0.1% which is again in line with IFR estimates we've been seeing lately. Worse than the flu, certainly, but not devastating.

Frankly, that's probably a conservative denominator.

Second as I explained in a peer post, trying to establish the infection fatality rate of the disease based on its case fatality rate is like trying to figure out how risky skydiving is by setting your denominator at "whoever shows up in hospital with skydiving injuries" and the numerator at "whoever survives" -- it's peak adverse selection bias. Can you imagine the government of Sweden telling the population that 1 in 10 of them will die and them being okay with this plan? haha.

Studies are pinning the infection fatality rate at between 0.25% and 1%, and more often than not in the lower quartile of that band -- and almost all of those deaths are the old and sick who should be isolated and protected.

Further, because so many people don't have symptoms and it's so contagious, and the vaccine is at least 12-18 months away, we are all going to get it. Well 70% of us anyways. Sweden is front-loading this burden. Basically none of the numbers are directly comparable, as the minute the US re-opens it'll be playing whack-a-mole with city/state level shutdowns as China is.

Sweden will not.

Re: California Covid-19 traffic report finds silver lining

#183

Post by [deleted] »

greedo wrote: post #158
arcticbull wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really actually! In your age category 50-59 your case fatality rate is 1.3% [1] and given the way it affects the older end of the band more significantly than yourself in the middle of the band, it wouldn't be at all unlikely that your case fatality rate is right around 1%. Further, we have been seeing anywhere from 30-80% of cases are asymptomatic or result in mild flulike symptoms and therefore not accounted fo…

Germany's CFR is north of 3% now, and steadily climbing.

[deleted]

Re: California Covid-19 traffic report finds silver lining

#184

Post by arcticbull »

greedo wrote: post #158
arcticbull wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really actually! In your age category 50-59 your case fatality rate is 1.3% [1] and given the way it affects the older end of the band more significantly than yourself in the middle of the band, it wouldn't be at all unlikely that your case fatality rate is right around 1%. Further, we have been seeing anywhere from 30-80% of cases are asymptomatic or result in mild flulike symptoms and therefore not accounted fo…

Germany's CFR is north of 3% now, and steadily climbing.

CFR is not IFR, it's not even particularly helpful or meaningful because it varies so much by demographics and hospital capacity.

Re: California Covid-19 traffic report finds silver lining

#185

Post by arcticbull »

Izkata wrote: post #168
arcticbull wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny you should mention that. You have approximately a 1% lifetime risk of dying from a car crash in the US [1], and your risk of dying from a COVID infection is 0.37% per the latest study from Germany (and it overwhelmingly only kills the old and sick). Given you develop immunity after (no evidence you don't yet), that represents a lifetime risk too. Which means, your lifetime risk of dying in a car accident remain…

> Given you develop immunity after (no evidence you don't yet) Not no evidence [0][1], it's currently my biggest fear about this virus. There's a few possibilities here: * The tests are picking up dead virus remains * Their tests were bad and they didn't actually recover * Their body didn't create enough antibodies and the immunity was weak * The virus is biphasic - symptoms stop for a while only to return later, and…

Indeed but that's not evidence of re-infection. That's evidence that re-infection should be thoroughly investigated. Rather, it's evidence of smoke not evidence of fire.

Re: California Covid-19 traffic report finds silver lining

#186

Post by arcticbull »

ckarmann wrote: post #102
arcticbull wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually dedicated much of my comment to addressing that, specifically pointing out that COVID represents a lifetime risk that's been front-loaded and so it's fair to compare COVID's infection fatality rate to your lifetime risk of dying in a car accident. I also called out explicitly that COVID has been front-loaded. Also, it's not a fair comparison between the flu and COVID because the flu has that unfortunate fe…

You also have to take into account the uncertainty in your risk evaluation. The fatality rate is largely unknown so it's a bit deceptive to quote numbers like 0.37% as if it could be measure up to the second decimal. The German study probably came with error bars that were larger than that. For the age group 50-59, maybe it's 1.3% according to NY state (for both males and females so if the person you responds to is m…

> This is not the flu, but it could very well come back next year or in ten years in a different form.

There has been no evidence of substantial mutations so far in COVID. There's no evidence that COVID will come back in a new and different form, any more than there's evidence I'll come back next week as a velociraptor. I mean, it could happen, but it's not something I'll plan for until I start sprouting scales and and a giant tail. Mutations are pretty random and the vast majority of mutations are harmful to the virus.

It's worth considering we live with coronaviridae all the time, something like 15% of the common cold is attributable to coronaviridae. [2] There's as much evidence of the common cold becoming Ebola as there is of me becoming a velociraptor.

The flu death range is likely more to do with how good a job we do guessing which the predominant strain will be in a given year, as the flu vaccine efficacy rate ranges from 10% to 60% each year. [1]

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/flu/vaccines-work/effectiveness-studies....

[2] https://www.webmd.com/cold-and-flu/cold-guide/common_cold_ca...

Re: California Covid-19 traffic report finds silver lining

#187

Post by arcticbull »

dagnabbit wrote: post #103
arcticbull wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny you should mention that. You have approximately a 1% lifetime risk of dying from a car crash in the US [1], and your risk of dying from a COVID infection is 0.37% per the latest study from Germany (and it overwhelmingly only kills the old and sick). Given you develop immunity after (no evidence you don't yet), that represents a lifetime risk too. Which means, your lifetime risk of dying in a car accident remain…

A 1% chance of death that’s evenly distributed across 80 years is dramatically less impactful to one’s expected quantity of life than a 1% chance of death that happens immediately. Additionally, I’d note that nearly all higher income individuals take steps to reduce their auto death risks including buying safer vehicles, living closer to work, and using professional drivers when drunk or otherwise impaired. As for yo…

> As for your final paragraph, it is wholly unreasonable to imply that covid (which is killing thousands of Americans per day despite a massive distancing effort) is less serious than the flu (which has persisted over a much longer period of time and which was not subject to special responses).

I didn't say or imply that. It's worse than the flu, probably 5-10X worse. Not bad, not great.

I'm suggesting that people are freaking out because there's "bodies on the street" and we're all in serious danger (we're overwhelmingly just not) when the death toll to date is about half of what we paid zero attention to whatsoever over the same time period.

My argument is that we shouldn't be nearly as freaked out about COVID as we are, and we should be more freaked out about the flu.

There's reason to take precautions, especially if you're in a risk category, but not at all to the extent of the panic we've seen to date.

In fact Sweden's plan of literally just that is going great, they've not shut anything down, and told people to stay home if they're sick (shocking, I know) and the serious-case infection growth rate has flattened out by itself. [1, 2]

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-19/sweden-sa...

[2] https://aatishb.com/covidtrends/?location=Canada&location=Sw...

Re: California Covid-19 traffic report finds silver lining

#188

Post by arcticbull »

DanBC wrote: post #135
arcticbull wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny you should mention that. You have approximately a 1% lifetime risk of dying from a car crash in the US [1], and your risk of dying from a COVID infection is 0.37% per the latest study from Germany (and it overwhelmingly only kills the old and sick). Given you develop immunity after (no evidence you don't yet), that represents a lifetime risk too. Which means, your lifetime risk of dying in a car accident remain…

> It's also worth calling out the flu has killed 2X as many people as COVID has to date this flu season. No, it hasn't. > A bad flu season in the US kills about 60K people each year. You're not counting covid-19 deaths and flu deaths using the same methods so you can't compare yet. The method you're using for flu is inclusive and will tend to overcount. The method you're using for covid-19 deaths excludes some deaths…

> No, it hasn't.

Yes, it has. Citation needed, because I provided data and you didn't.

> You're not counting covid-19 deaths and flu deaths using the same methods so you can't compare yet. The method you're using for flu is inclusive and will tend to overcount. The method you're using for covid-19 deaths excludes some deaths and we know it's undercounting covid-19 deaths.

[citation needed]

> When we get the figures for care home and nursing home deaths included we'll see large increases in covid-19 deaths.

That's a totally dishonest way of approaching this when we know for a fact people under 50 have basically no risk from COVID and that folks who are over 70 have easily two orders of magnitude higher risk. In Italy, 99.2% of people who died were age 80.5 and had an average of 3 underlying diseases.

Age 30-39 they had 5 deaths, under 30, 0 deaths at the time this article was written [1] as compared to 852 deaths aged 80-89.

You and I both know the young aren't affected meaningfully, and for them, they won't go to the hospital with a mild cough or with no symptoms at all and so aren't counted in the denominator. You're advocating growing the numerator without growing the denominator to make your case seem stronger than it is.

> It is dishonest to point to a severe flu season and talk about "flu killing 60k people per year". The range is 12k to 61k. https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html

I don't think it's crazy to compare a "bad COVID year" to a "bad flu year" do you? Our response to a bad flu year is exactly the same as our response to a good flu year. Most people don't really know there is such a thing.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-18/99-of-tho...

Re: California Covid-19 traffic report finds silver lining

#189

Post by arcticbull »

lisper wrote: post #76
arcticbull wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really actually! In your age category 50-59 your case fatality rate is 1.3% [1] and given the way it affects the older end of the band more significantly than yourself in the middle of the band, it wouldn't be at all unlikely that your case fatality rate is right around 1%. Further, we have been seeing anywhere from 30-80% of cases are asymptomatic or result in mild flulike symptoms and therefore not accounted fo…

I worry about car crashes too! :-)

That's a very reasonable reaction.

Re: California Covid-19 traffic report finds silver lining

#190

Post by zaroth »

amalter wrote: post #176
dennisgorelik wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> because of the actions you took What actions do you mean? Move out from downtown to suburbs?

Given enough time, an unchecked virus with the attributes of this Coronavirus will saturate through semi-rural and even rural populations. It’s it might take more time, but that’s usually coupled with more spread out medical services. Without significant efforts to lower the R value (Aka the actions I alluded to; facial covering, social distancing, track and trace) - it’s only a matter of when, not if. Minus a wonder…

New York is starting randomly sampled antibody testing this week.

I am hopeful that they will find that they are already well into the prevalence range of herd immunity. If so, that will put them, to use a turn of the phrase, ahead of the curve. It would also mean that they didn't really flatten anything at all, and they could suspend their shutdown immediately.

If they are only at low single digit prevalence, that would be truly very bad news indeed.

If they're somewhere in the middle, say, 25-35% prevalence, then they could get through it with one more surge, or draw it out indefinitely. In that case it will be interesting to see which path they choose.

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