191–200 of 679 posts
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…
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…
The rates being this high actually casts doubt on the study. It’s very very implausible, and suggests almost surely a selection bias in the sample towards a population much more likely to have contracted it.
This cohort would skew younger and wealthier, which correlates with better preexisting health and fewer risk factors, and would exclude populations who systematically left the city, or who have known heightened risk factors.
Comparing the death rate overall with the infection rate of this skewed sample would be likely to greatly underestimate the actual death rate of the virus.
So, at what point can we declare the lockdown to be a harmful overreaction and start opening countries up? Will we hold anyone accountable for models which proved to be pessimistic by orders of magnitude, causing implosion of economies around the world?
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Do non-severe cases cause lung damage too? Is the lung damage heal able?
That is the point of my question. There has been no evidence of damage in non severe cases. Indeed, we are having to get complicated testing to find out many people had it at all.
So, at what point can we declare the lockdown to be a harmful overreaction and start opening countries up? Will we hold anyone accountable for models which proved to be pessimistic by orders of magnitude, causing implosion of economies around the world?
Without a lockdown, a month more of infections would have likely bumped NYC to achieving herd immunity, or 60-ish percent, since 20% to 60% does not take long with exponential growth.
This means two things. One, it would mean that we would have almost certainly overwhelmed the hospitals with triple the rate of infections. We've be leaving people dead in the streets and it would be a humanitarian disaster as every hospital was at double capacity.
It would also have meant that the curve would be flattened for good.
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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…
I don't know if the hospitalisation rate is so out of whack vs the flu. It should be higher. But does 20% of the population catches the flu in a matter of weeks?
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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.
A counter argument is that the same didn't happen (or hasn't happened yet) in cities that also have massive public transportation systems like Tokyo or Seoul. There is probably many confounding factors, such as mask use, no talking on the subway, etc, to make pointing to one particular factor very hard. EDIT: typo
Widespread mask usage doesn't happen in NYC, same as the rest of the U.S. It's very recent this is practiced in the U.S., whether voluntarily or by order of a handful of local governments. And in my local area where it's not mandatory I only see about 3 in 4 using masks.
If this study is accurate, then 1.8 million NYC resident are infected. So 15 411 deaths (as of today, including 5 121 probable deaths) suggests COVID-19 has a fatality rate of MINIMUM 0.9% which is in line with previous estimates (between 0.5 and 1.6%) and this is MINIMUM 9 times more fatal than the flu (0.1%). Edited to add "MINIMUM", as there is a lag between case detection and death (I should have known better to…
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A datum that is hard to square when the deaths are still dominated by the older population. If you had convinced everyone over seventy to move out of NYC last year, their CFR would be a fraction of what it is now.
So the IFR will be lower in the rest of the country than in NYC because... they are going to send everyone over seventy to the Moon or something?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
The only good news that I am getting out of this, is that NYC seems to have avoided the dreaded 3-5% fatality rate that was the presumed worse case scenario (massive community spread, overloaded healthcare system). But the lockdown likely helped a lot, and it seems like they are seeing around 1% IFR, so I am not sure this really changes anything. Our understanding of the disease and how to treat it may also be gettin…
Unfortunately 21% is a long way from 70%, and it's taken a massive amount of death to get to that point.