Preliminary test results suggest 21% of NYC residents have Covid antibodies • Hacker News Board

Re: Preliminary test results suggest 21% of NYC residents have Covid antibodies

#101

Post by taeric » Thu, Apr 23, 2020, 6:50 PM UTC

eloff wrote: post #94

taeric wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This feels like fear talking. As more data comes in, we are seeing more people with no affects. Not just mild, but nigh non existent. It is agreed that something gives people severe cases. Severe includes death and recovered with damage. We don't seem to have data letting you know who or what would land there.

I disagree, see my sister comment. Even without data on lingering deficiencies, we can speculate with confidence that it carries a cost.

Speculation is fine. But we need data to back it. Right now, we don't. Could hypothesize that many being found with damage surviving, had damage going in. Would neatly explain why it hit them so hard.

Re: Preliminary test results suggest 21% of NYC residents have Covid antibodies

#102

Post by ineedasername » Thu, Apr 23, 2020, 6:50 PM UTC

I couldn't find any detailed write up about their selection methods for participants, only the basics of where they found them. Without that, it is very hard to determine whether or not there's some flavor of selection bias: If it is voluntary, and they do not screen out people who report having had cold/flu symptoms, then they run the risk of attracting a disproportionate number of people who volunteer because they're curious if their prior symptoms were actually coronavirus. That would make it far from a random sample. The fact that they sampled only people actually leaving their house is also a form of selection bias: these are the people more likely to be exposed and may represent a disproportionately high infection rate as well.

So I await further information.

That said, even if it's overall 0.6%, that is still 6x higher than flu, and higher than H1N1 which had a CFR around 0.1 for areas with adequate health care. (much higher when there was not adequate care, but that is not dissimilar to Covid.)

So no matter what, no one should be walking away from this study saying "See it's no big deal! Just the Flu/Cold etc!"

Re: Preliminary test results suggest 21% of NYC residents have Covid antibodies

#103

Post by nicoburns » Thu, Apr 23, 2020, 6:50 PM UTC

WrtCdEvrydy wrote: post #64

chasd00 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that's crazy to me, what are the demographics of NYC? Is the population more susceptible to dying of Covid19 somehow? I still can't get my head around why NY has suffered so disproportionately.

It's a small state with a lot of people packed next to each other. Lots of people use public transit... subways are less than six feet apart.

If the NY subway is anything like London, people will be less than 6 inches apart at rush hour. I imagine that will have played a big part in the spread in both of those cities.

Re: Preliminary test results suggest 21% of NYC residents have Covid antibodies

#104

Post by core-questions » Thu, Apr 23, 2020, 6:51 PM UTC

chasd00 wrote: post #58

brandmeyer wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was astonished by your 1/1000 figure and had to look it up... If anything, its too low . 15k deaths (proven+probable) in 8M people is almost 2/1000. https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-data.page

that's crazy to me, what are the demographics of NYC? Is the population more susceptible to dying of Covid19 somehow? I still can't get my head around why NY has suffered so disproportionately.

There are many close-knit communities in NYC and the surrounding area where people live much more densely (i.e. large family in a single house) and congregate more often with one another than do West Coast types. Jewish communities in New York seem to be especially hit by this; not sure if this is because they did not follow social distancing guidelines, or if they're not possible to follow given unavoidable physical constraints.

Re: Preliminary test results suggest 21% of NYC residents have Covid antibodies

#105

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Apr 23, 2020, 6:51 PM UTC

grandmczeb wrote: post #90

djrogers wrote: post #87

I'm starting to wonder if there aren't 2 (or more) transmission methods for this virus with differing symptoms. Aerosol transmission with 'I got a cold' type symptoms, and droplet transmission with 'I got the worst cold I've ever had' type symptoms.

Why would different transmission methods result in different symptoms?

[deleted]

Re: Preliminary test results suggest 21% of NYC residents have Covid antibodies

#106

Post by DeonPenny » Thu, Apr 23, 2020, 6:51 PM UTC

eloff wrote: post #94

taeric wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This feels like fear talking. As more data comes in, we are seeing more people with no affects. Not just mild, but nigh non existent. It is agreed that something gives people severe cases. Severe includes death and recovered with damage. We don't seem to have data letting you know who or what would land there.

I disagree, see my sister comment. Even without data on lingering deficiencies, we can speculate with confidence that it carries a cost.

But you shouldnt do that. Just like when we believe the death rate was 3% it seems we can't be confident in anything we've been told.

Re: Preliminary test results suggest 21% of NYC residents have Covid antibodies

#107

Post by tunesmith » Thu, Apr 23, 2020, 6:51 PM UTC

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #83

tunesmith wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hospitalization rates per infection are greater for covid than for flu. What matters is hospital capacity, to protect against greater non-covid death rates.

I agree, but this is not universally believed. Many people argue that hospital capacity is not what matters, and we must continue lockdowns even if hospitals won't be overloaded to eradicate the disease.

Ah, yeah. If hospitals are fine, I think lockdowns can be swapped for a contact tracing system, assuming enough people use it and assuming easy test access and 24-hour test turnarounds. (And even then... use masks.)

But, in the absence of that, if a hospital is at 50% capacity, I don't agree with opening up a lockdown until a hospital gets to 95% capacity.

(The game changes entirely if we get a good anti-viral.)

Re: Preliminary test results suggest 21% of NYC residents have Covid antibodies

#108

Post by guscost » Thu, Apr 23, 2020, 6:52 PM UTC

zucker42 wrote: post #81

guscost wrote: post #7

While this is great information, a few facts will still confound attempts to speculate based on this number: - The production of IgG antibodies is mostly delayed until after an infection is cleared. - This is a random sample of people who were outside, it's not representative of the total population. - Non-trivial numbers of people may never develop detectable antibodies for SARS-CoV-2: https://www.medrxiv.org/conten…

I'm sorry, I don't know much about medicine so maybe you could clear up what those studies found. If I understand correctly, they both looked at COVID-19 patients and the first one found 83% had detectable antibodies and the second one found 163 / 173 had detectable antibodies? Or maybe I just completely don't understand it. Also it looks like they chose people with symptoms (i.e. "COVID-19 patients"). Would we expec…

I'm not a professional and some of this interpretation may be wrong:

In the first report, 83% of people who tested positive for viral RNA (an active infection) had immune T cells that seem able to neutralize the virus, possibly without antibodies. I don't see any information on whether these patients were also tested for antibodies later, but in theory some of them could have cleared the infection without developing any.

Another cohort of healthy blood donors was tested for SARS-CoV-2 antibodies, and among the samples that did not have them, 34% had T cells that also seem able to neutralize the virus. They note that these cells appeared to work in only one of the two ways that were observed with the PCR-test-positive patients' T cells. The idea is that this one method of neutralizing SARS-CoV-2 could be a carry-over from other human coronavirus infections in the past, and any antibodies generated by this method would be ignored by tests specific to SARS-CoV-2.

Also the seronegative healthy donors skewed female and younger compared to the PCR-test-positive patients, but I'm not sure if that is significant.

In the second report, around 5% of people who tested positive for viral RNA (had active infections), and then recovered, still developed no detectable antibodies. It's possible that more than 5% of exposed people are clearing the infection without developing antibodies, because this sample was taken from confirmed cases, and someone with pre-existing immunity may be less likely to develop symptoms.

Of course, keep in mind that both of these are preprints, and may contain methodological errors.

Re: Preliminary test results suggest 21% of NYC residents have Covid antibodies

#109

Post by cma » Thu, Apr 23, 2020, 6:53 PM UTC

glofish wrote: post #60

cma wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exaggerated in that the California study predicted a flu like IFR (Ioannidis, one of the authors, has been pushing that as his pet theory for over a month). This shows it is more likely several times that.

it doesn't contradic Ioannidis at all. He might be right in the end, and that would be an incredibly bitter pill to many. We are getting closer and closer to the flu fatality rate. from 5% to 3%, then 1% now 0.5% - smart money (and common sense) would bet that the rate will continue to drop, I would expect that people living in healthier environment than NYC will fare even better. No way NYC IFR is the upper bound fo…

3.4% was never stated to be anything but the case fatality rate. The WHO's statement was:

>Globally, about 3.4% of reported COVID-19 cases have died

Ioannidis acknowledged that in his original STAT article:

>Reported case fatality rates, like the official 3.4% rate from the World Health Organization, cause horror — and are meaningless.

Maybe because he had an editor. But I saw him in a recent video claim the WHO said 3.4% of people who get infected would die. A blatant lie:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwPqmLoZA4s&t=12m54s

Re: Preliminary test results suggest 21% of NYC residents have Covid antibodies

#110

Post by daxfohl » Thu, Apr 23, 2020, 6:53 PM UTC

jdm2212 wrote: post #85

daxfohl wrote: post #72

I find myself reconsidering the original proposition by England to isolate the most vulnerable for a couple months and let the virus work its course through the less vulnerable population. If death rate is substantially lower among the under 50 crowd, this could work its way through with a fairly low death toll, and result in a herd immunity within a couple months. This slow burn approach we're doing however seems po…

The outcomes aren't just death and recovery. There's also the possibility of long-term heart, lung, and kidney damage. And the blood thinners used to prevent coronavirus blood clots can cause brain bleeding. Those happen in younger people, too. And realistically there's no way to isolate those over 50. They generally live with, work with, or are cared for by younger people.

But that's going to happen anyway because people will catch it until we hit herd immunity. Unless a vaccine comes out before we get there, which seems pretty iffy at this point.

I do think we can plan for the isolation of that population for a couple of months if we have some strong leadership. Unfortunately that seems to be lacking right now.