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

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

#111
post #58

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.

The most likely answer is that NYC was just a good place for it to spread which had plenty of travelers to get things started fast, but that that the death rates aren't particularly high -- everywhere that has fewer deaths has just had less of their population infected ... so far.

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

#112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We'd also need to make the decsision to continue a lockdown over a virus with a 99.5% survival rate or not. Seeing at the flu has a 99.9% survival rate does it make sense to destroy the economy over that.

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

But we can't say that it could just be that infection because of a lack of herd immunity is the only thing preventing something like the flu from having the same result.

If they have the same hospitalization rate yet covid-19 infection rate is twice the flu because of the lack of immunity you would immediately double the hospitalizations. There's two variables in that equation

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

#113
post #26
post #2

Another datapoint suggesting the death rate of this virus is within 0.5%.

15,000 deaths (So far) in NYC. 8.4 million people. If 20% of the population has had it, the death rate is 1%... Assuming that none of the currently infected die. Which is an unreasonable assumption (As the mean time to death from the point of infection seems to be ~2 weeks, and infections have doubled over the past 2 weeks.)

But those currently infected are not included in the 20% of the population that has had it. Or maybe some are, but most of those infected now who may still die, do not have antibodies yet.

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

#114
post #60
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…

That's some major revisionism. No credible source was ever suggesting a 5% IFR. For example the Imperial model was using 0.9% given UK's age distribution. That looks likely to be spot on.

And Ioannidis? He was quite certain that the CFR was going to be a little higher than 0.1%. Yes. CFR, not IFR. So he's off by two orders of magnitude.

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

#116
post #17

This study doesn't appear to suffer from the same methodology problems as the Stanford study of a few days ago. In that study, they recruited people through Facebook, and reported an infection rate that was low enough that it could have been caused by false positives. Here, it's closer to a random sample, but more importantly it shows really high rates. Those rates overwhelm any error due to false positives. Also, it…

Sorry, can someone spell out how this might be good news? 21% is still a long way from herd immunity, and NYC's hospital system has been severely strained getting to this point. On top of that, the hospitalization rate still seems disproportionate to someone getting the flu - maybe it's five times as fatal, but it's > 5x the flu hospitalization rate. It's not like the virus has become less dangerous, we're just reali…

This is good news because the mortality rate keeps coming down... If you don't know why that's good news then back to your bunker.

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

#117
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.

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…

> Jewish communities in New York seem to be especially hit by this

From my understanding they are not hit any harder than other groups, they are just way more visible.

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

#118
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…

Sweden didn't lockdown and might have herd immunity in weeks, according to their chief epidemiologist. It'll be interesting to see how this plays out in the long run.

“In major parts of Sweden, around Stockholm, we have reached a plateau (in new cases) and we’re already seeing the effect of herd immunity and in a few weeks’ time we’ll see even more of the effects of that. And in the rest of the country, the situation is stable,” Dr. Anders Tegnell, chief epidemiologist at Sweden’s Public Health Agency

Tegnell said sampling and modeling data indicated that 20% of Stockholm’s population is already immune to the virus, and that “in a few weeks’ time we might reach herd immunity and we believe that is why we’re seeing a slow decline in cases, in spite of sampling (testing for the coronavirus) more and more.”

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/22/no-lockdown-in-sweden-but-st...

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

#119
post #88
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NYC is a younger, healthier city than the national average. NYC also has one of the best medical systems not just in America, but in the world. Roughly 0.2% of everyone in NYC has already died of COVID-19. So 0.2% is pretty close to a hard lower bound on the IFR for COVID-19. And I don't think anyone serious suggests every NYC resident has had COVID. I don't think anyone seriously suggests even half of NYC has had CO…

That it's a lower bound for IFR in NYC. With how widely that changes based on age alone, it could also vary based on location. Such that NYC could conceivably have the highest value for that in the US.

NYC is younger and healthier than the US average so these are lower bounds for national average outcomes.

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

#120
post #16
post #2

Another datapoint suggesting the death rate of this virus is within 0.5%.

I had the opposite conclusion. There are between 10k-15k COVID-19 associated deaths in NYC, depending on how you count (the higher rate is consistent with the excess-mortality data, I believe). That by itself produces a range of ~0.56%-0.86% if you assume 21.2 % of NYC has been infected (larger range if you allow for some error on the infection rate, obviously). Moreover, we don't know what fraction of the currently-…

It’s not clear what kind of antibodies they’re testing for, but it can take up to 4 weeks after infection to develop detectable levels of antibodies. It takes on average ~3 weeks after infection to die. There needs to be some time lag adjustment in your calculation, which would likely result in a lower IFR.

IMO the two effects probably about cancel each other out and we’re looking at <1% IFR for the population tested (AFAIK children weren’t included).

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