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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

#351
post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The death rate of 0.5% falls right in the range of what modelers have been using, by the way. Not exactly very positive news.

Yeah, still 150,000 death toll if everybody gets infected. And this is not considering the permanent lung and other tissue damage that's getting reported from "recovered" patients.

You are one order of magnitude too low at 150,000. It's much worse than that.

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

#352
post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As with any viral pneumonia

Any novel viral pneumonia. A garden snake and a cobra are both snakes. Belonging to the same category says nothing about the potency of their bite. We have no idea what kind of snake this is yet.

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

#353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One critique was that the segment of the population who would respond to the ad and actually test may be more likely to have experienced COVID-like symptoms.

Also people reported sharing the Santa Clara link with others who might want the test (due to having had symptoms). In principle you could have the same problem with this survey: call your buddy and say “come on down to Costco—they’re doing free antibody tests”. The obvious fix is to not tell people the results of their own tests. Not sure of the ethics/consequences of that approach.

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

#354

At 21% it would be time to end the shutdown. EDIT: Read the comments below.

I'd think it'd be decided based upon the new cases and hospitalization and death rates, not an estimate of population with exposure.

Sorry, but that's dumb. If 1/5th of the population has been exposed, then you know the total strain on the healthcare system is extremely unlikely to top an additional 4x what it has been, but not only it has 1/5th the population being exposed not in fact been enough to overwhelm the healthcare system, as more of the population is exposed you begin to get herd immunity, so in fact the total strain on the healthcare system is extremely unlikely to reach a total of 5x what it has been, very likely not even half that.

Give all of that, it makes no sense to continue the shutdown considering how costly the shutdown is.

To those who think this is a question of saving lives, that's not so. At this point the disease will work its way through the population because there's no time to finish testing, producing, and distributing a vaccine, which means the only question is of managing the maximum load on the healthcare system. Moreover, many of the most vulnerable have been hit already, and those who haven't can be protected by measures far short of a shutdown.

No, at 21% it is most definitely time to stop the shutdown. (Note: not all the measures, just the shutdown.)

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

#355
post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What? 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 dea…

Herd immunity doesn't mean 100% exposure. It means a high enough incidence of antibodies such that the effective R0 goes lower than one, meaning that new outbreaks tend to shrink over time and not grow.

With most endemic viruses, antibody incidence is somewhere around 30-50% I believe, but I haven't seen any modelling for what covid is expected to do specifically.

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

#356
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…

Also, I don't the flu's fatality is calculated against every exposed to the flu but against everyone who gets sick with the flu. If the flu also 50% asymptomatic exposed individuals, that would know it's fatality rate down further for comparison's sake.

We calculate both. Case fatality rate (CFR) is based on patients who test positive, whereas infection fatality rate (IFR) is based on all infections. We don't yet have adequate random sampling to have confidence in IFR estimates.

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

#357
post #163

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'…

0.6% this is the estimated ifr. comparing it to the cfr of flu is not right, which is about ten times less than the flu ifr - or about 60 times less than this figure. your conclusion is upheld, but even moreso

According to the CDC, the estimated prevalence of symptomatic flu last year was 45 million illnesses and 61,000 deaths.

For NY, assuming it’s evenly distributed, that would translate into 13.8% of 20 million = 2.8m symptomatic flu cases and 3,753 deaths.

COVID appears to be significantly more prevalent (roughly twice as prevalent in just 3 months as flu gets all year despite incredible efforts), and roughly 2-3x as fatal.

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

#358
post #170

Earlier 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…

I don't think you are looking at this right. It will still take about a year (+/- a few months) for this to run through the population of the country. NYC spreads faster and was hit harder and earlier. Still only about 1/5 have had it. The remaining 4/5 (maybe 3/5 if there is some fraction of people that just are naturally immune/resistant) are going to get it. It's going to be a while to get there.

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

#359

At 21% it would be time to end the shutdown. EDIT: Read the comments below.

That doesn't make sense to me. I would think you'd want to get to the point where you've reached the carrying capacity, so that "overshoot" of the equilibrium doesn't result.

See my other reply below. You can't overshoot 100%, and long before we get there herd immunity takes hold, and there's no question of the disease being kept from working its way through -- only a question of managing the rate at which it does. All in all the economic damage of continued shutdown does not make sense at this point (at 21% of the population exposed). We should stop now.

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

#360
post #317

> In his press conference today, Governor Cuomo revealed the preliminary results of a first-phase antibody test that surveyed 3,000 New Yorkers over two days in 19 counties at 40 locations that included grocery and big-box stores. The sample suggests that 13.9% of New York State residents have the antibodies, meaning they had the virus at one point and recovered. Of the regions tested–Long Island, NYC, Westchester/Ro…

Sure all of these studies are potentially flawed but they're all generally pointing in the same direction. There are many more infections than we know about and the CFR is not anywhere close to the actual IFR. NYC is an outlier with a 21% infection estimate but for the rest of NY (outside NYC metro/Westchester/LI) the estimate is 3.6%. Santa Clara estimate was 3%. LA County estimate was 4%. Seems like a trend is deve…

>There are many more infections than we know about and the CFR is not anywhere close to the actual IFR.

That is the optimistic takeaway.

The pessimistic takeaway is that even the hardest hit areas are nowhere near herd immunity levels and that we are either going to be isolating until a vaccine is created or we can expect to see a lot more death once nonessential people are forced back to work.

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