Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

6sqft.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

301–310 of 679 posts

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

#301

Post by ineedasername »

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #283
ineedasername wrote: post #102

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'…

Do you have a source for the CFR of 0.1 for H1N1? I could only find this[1], which is a much smaller number. [1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8406723.stm

You may be looking at "settled" numbers when all was said & done and all facts were known. That's not an "apples to apples" comparison with current covid-19 knowledge.

Here's my source [0] and the relevant quote, below. It is the CFR during the H1N1 pandemic, 10 weeks into it, which is why it is a much more appropriate (though not perfect) "apples to apples" comparison with Covid-19:

>"The overall case fatality rate as of 16 July 2009 (10 weeks after the first international alert) with pandemic H1N1 influenza varied from 0.1% to 5.1% depending on the country."

[0] https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/global-covid-19-case-fatality-...

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

#302

Post by rocha »

cmurf wrote: post #197
rocha wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Those cities see more widespread use of masks generally. And specifically once COVID-19 was common knowledge, so was the use of masks. 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.

Yep, I agree with you. I was trying to make the point that massive transportation is not the only factor at play. Like you said, there are many others that should be considered.

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

#303

Post by taeric »

bryansum wrote: post #259
taeric wrote: post #162

Earlier 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.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

But there is evidence in all of the asymptomatic people getting tested and not having any affects worth making it into a report.

Could they have hidden damage that we can't detect? Plausible. But that is true of many activities. And illnesses.

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

#304

Post by Symmetry »

ccleve wrote: 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…

And the specificity of the test might be worse than advertised but it wouldn't be credible that it could be making a big different with the 20% positive rate here.

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

#305

Post by eloff »

taeric wrote: post #161
eloff wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not speculating about the long term effects of covid19. I'm saying all sickness carries a cost as currently understood according to our theories of cellular senescence. You've missed my point entirely.

And you are missing mine. Agreed there could be long term things. Yes, we should study that and watch for it. If that is the extent of your point, then my response is "yes, and?" Your framing, though, begs the question that mild cases have long term damage. We have zero evidence of that. Literally none.

You're still missing my point.

I'm saying all sickness comes with a long term cost. It gives you a shove toward the grave. Covid19 falls into that category, regardless of how much or little we know about it.

Now you could argue that sickness and aging don't work that way. I don't think you'd be right, but you can make that argument.

Your argument about the long term effects of covid19 is not relevant to the point I made.

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

#306

Post by mrb »

dragonwriter wrote: post #262
mrb wrote: post #183

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…

> If this study is accurate, then 1.8 million NYC resident are infected. So 10 290 deaths (as of today) suggests COVID-19 has a fatality rate of 0.6% No, it doesn't, because the usual time to death, if it causes death, isn't zero, so you need to compare the number of deaths a couple weeks from now with the number of infections today to get a closer-to-accurate number. Also, you are using the 10,290 confirmed deaths a…

You are correct, edited.

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

#307

Post by gridlockd »

dragonwriter wrote: post #262
mrb wrote: post #183

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…

> If this study is accurate, then 1.8 million NYC resident are infected. So 10 290 deaths (as of today) suggests COVID-19 has a fatality rate of 0.6% No, it doesn't, because the usual time to death, if it causes death, isn't zero, so you need to compare the number of deaths a couple weeks from now with the number of infections today to get a closer-to-accurate number. Also, you are using the 10,290 confirmed deaths a…

The time to go positive on an antibody test is not zero either, probably 7 to 14 days. Also the infection rate is lower now than it was in the past. I doubt this adds up to more than 50% higher mortality.

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

#308

Post by taeric »

karagenit wrote: post #261
alkibiades wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

going 7 times doesn’t actually increase the likelihood 7x but your point still stands that they would be far more likely to get it

Well, sort of. The increase in likelihood of being sampled due to going to the store N times more than the average person is a function of N and P (the probability of being sampled in any given trip) such that f(N, P): (1 - ((1-P)^N)) / P For a large P you're right, but as P gets very small (let's say that in any given trip you have a 0.01% chance of being sampled) then the increase in likelihood of being sampled app…

Maybe, more rapid trips may reduce your odds of being there when the sample happens on a day. Such that you may have a lower p. :)

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

#309

Post by longtimegoogler »

cma wrote: post #169
jsnell wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 .

At various points in interviews and articles he used Diamond Princess, South Korea, Germany, Iceland as strong evidence of miniscule fatality rates, in every single case selectively ignoring that deaths lag symptoms which was already well known at the time. All of them had their death rates double or more after he used them, and it was easily predictable based on recent exponential growth and death lag. In his stat a…

His data from the Diamond Princess is completely outdated. He cited 7 deaths. We are now up to 13 with 7 more on critical condition. He has been completely wrong in each of his predictions.

I would respect him more if he just argued from am economic perspective that the economic damage is greater but his wild hypotheses about Covid being comparable to the common cold or flu have been completely refuted by all data.

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

#310

Post by ineedasername »

Retric wrote: post #137
ineedasername wrote: post #98

Earlier 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…

Flu rates are based on all known knowledge, population testing, etc. We don't have that for covid-19. If you want a good apple-to-apples comparison of lethality of another pandemic, you need to find CFR numbers that were available during the pandemic. That is what I provided in my post. Here is the source I got them from [0] which gives the CFR at the 10-week mark for H1N1, somewhat similar to where we are now. Here's the relevant quote:

>"The overall case fatality rate as of 16 July 2009 (10 weeks after the first international alert) with pandemic H1N1 influenza varied from 0.1% to 5.1% depending on the country."

[0] https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/global-covid-19-case-fatality-...

Post reply on HN