Earlier quoted context omitted.
has anyone modeled at one point deaths from economic collapse overtake deaths from Covid19?
I would be very sceptical about any models produced in the US, since the issue is so partisan, and one can tweak variables to prove whatever outcome one wants from a model. I think the lost life-years of economic hardship could easily outweigh the lost life-years of Covid deaths. That is because economic hardship affects younger people, while Covid deaths primarily affect people with not many years left to live. But…
Preliminary test results suggest 21% of NYC residents have Covid antibodies
291–300 of 679 posts
Re: Preliminary test results suggest 21% of NYC residents have Covid antibodies
#292If this study is accurate, and is not just working on garbage data, and if these antibodies actually mean long-term immunity, this means one of two things: 1. If the lockdown is lifted, we will see another ~60,000 to 100,000 deaths in NYC, before it will hit herd immunity. 2. Or, the lockdown will continue. The accuracy of antibody studies has been called into doubt, and as far as I know, nobody has ever followed up…
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.
As Joseph Stiglitz said the other day "In those circumstances it won’t be the government enforcing the lockdown, it will be fear. The concern is that people are not going to be spending on anything other than food and that’s the definition of a Great Depression."
Re: Preliminary test results suggest 21% of NYC residents have Covid antibodies
#293If 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…
It's also lower than the 3% that was predicted that people used to justify the shutdown and closer inline with the swine flu or rotovirus.
The shutdown wasn't, and isn't, based on the fatality rate under current conditions as much as the shape of the curve of various medical resources being required (total hospital beds, ICU beds, ventilators, PPE for healthcare workers, etc.), the anticipated speed of being able to bring more online, and the likely impact of exceeding available supply on death rates and other health outcomes, both for COVID-19 victims and patients with other health conditions. (A potential problem which was significantly realized in Italy, where things like ventilators were for a while allocated based on other factors besides medical need, since the number with need exceeded the supply.)
It's important to remember that the fatality rate of a disease isn't a constant, and changes to conditions (like, we can no longer provide ventilators to everyone who needs one) can change that rate.
Re: Preliminary test results suggest 21% of NYC residents have Covid antibodies
#294Earlier quoted context omitted.
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'…
Flu is generally well under 0.1% of those infected on average. If you’re comparing them you want to either include or exclude asymptotic people from both populations. “Symptomatic Illnesses” https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html As to NYC deaths, many people currently infected will die in the future. You can make various estimates to account for this but a reasonable first approximation is to double current…
(Sorry, couldn't resist).
Re: Preliminary test results suggest 21% of NYC residents have Covid antibodies
#295Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
How about this article [1] (translation at reddit [2]) about german divers who had "mild cases" (no hospitalization, recovered at home) and were found to have suffered permanent lung damage, so severe that they can't dive anymore. [1] https://www.rainews.it/tgr/tagesschau/articoli/2020/04/tag-C... [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/Coronavirus/comments/g3rv7h/permame...
Sounds like a promising lead to go down. I think my other criticisms are still unaddressed. Scarring damage is tough to place in age. Is plausible that they had some pre existing damage already.
Funny to see the comments talk if walking pneumonia. I had that a decade ago. Was cake compared to whatever hit me early March.
Re: Preliminary test results suggest 21% of NYC residents have Covid antibodies
#296Earlier 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…
> Sorry, can someone spell out how this might be good news? It's good news because it strongly suggests that mortality is much less than previously suspected. There were numbers floating around from anywhere between 10% to 3% a few weeks back. A mortality rate < 1% is very good news because it means fewer people will die in the long run.
Re: Preliminary test results suggest 21% of NYC residents have Covid antibodies
#297Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, but a person who goes to the store 7 times a week is ~7 times as likely to have been sampled compared to someone who goes only once a week. They are also ~7 times as likely to have contracted covid-19 at the grocery store. It's likely that they are also, in general, isolating less than the other. This sampling would have a (possibly slight, but still unknown) bias towards people who are isolating less (who you…
Even with worst-case scenario of bias, this is still extremely good news. My worry was always with super spreaders who refuse to isolate but the data is suggesting that those spreaders will still soon achieve herd immunity among themselves. As long as the rest of the society behaves we will still hit zero cases relatively quickly. (which wasn't always clear to me before since I initially predicted that this will take…
All of these numbers are inline with what experts have been saying and modeling for more than a month. We will be dealing with this for at least another year. We will cycle through policy to loosen up and close back down a little. In the best case for NYC they are 1/4th of the way to herd immunity in numbers. With the drop in transmissions, this might be 1/8th of the way in terms of time. There will be more deaths in the future than have been recorded so far.
Look for the bright side in things, but zero cases is a pipe dream.
Re: Preliminary test results suggest 21% of NYC residents have Covid antibodies
#298This 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…
Why does recruiting through Facebook invalidate the results? If it is a representative sample it is a representative sample regardless of how people were recruited.
Because “people who both use Facebook and don't automatically discount every ad or other solicitation on Facebook not from someone they personally know, especially if it invokes a major news story, because of the risk of it being a scam looking to steal personal information or do something similarly nefarious” are not representative of “people”.
Re: Preliminary test results suggest 21% of NYC residents have Covid antibodies
#299So, 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?
0.18% of the entire NYC population is already dead from the coronavirus and by the time this is over the number will probably reach or exceed 0.3%. If you want the whole country to get herd immunity you will probably see similar mortality rates across the country. 0.3% of the US population is 1 million people. How have the models been proven to be "pessimistic by orders of magnitude?
More importantly, herd immunity is the ONLY solution on the table right now, the lockdown is not about stopping the virus in its tracks. It is about spreading it out over a period of time.
Re: Preliminary test results suggest 21% of NYC residents have Covid antibodies
#300Earlier quoted context omitted.
You also have to adjust for the people who are already sick but haven't died yet. That would likely get you somewhere between 1 and 1.5%. So for herd immunity in the US at 200,000,000 recovered, that would be 2 to 3 million. That's consistent with earlier projections.
one problem with all these projections is that they all assume everyone is the same and that it is just a matter of chance. Not true in the least bit. those most susceptible get the disease first, those most sensitive die first - I believe the ratios will not stay the same, but continuously tick downwards
Hope it stays that way.