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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

#391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if 100% of the USA gets it at 330 M people that amounts to: 1,650,000 deaths. It is unlikely 100% will catch it from a single wave however.

Which is about 1/2 of what die in a normal year. The real question is how much do those circles overlap. Are we saving lives, or are people now dying in June that would have died in November anyway?

There's a metric called something like "estimated years of life lost" based on mortality rate by age and life expectancy, but you'd also want to factor in individual life expectancy—a lot of the people dying from this already had other health conditions.

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

#392
post #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…

I don't get it. We have numerous reports of the antibody tests being inaccurate. We have numerous reports suggesting you can get the disease twice => once does not equal immunity. So how exactly are these Swedish scientists testing for immunity?

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

#393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Why does recruiting through Facebook invalidate the results? If 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”.

If a representative portion of the population didn't click on Facebook ads then Facebook wouldn't generate revenue from these ads. Testing doesn't rely on the person being intelligent either. Because it sounds like you're just saying "results are bad because only idiots would click on a Facebook ad".

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

#394
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…

> New York City had the highest positive rate at 21.2%. The potential good news to come to light is that the death rate may be far lower than some estimates, at 0.5%.

How do they get to 0.5%? According to NYC data if you include "probable" cases, 15,400 people, or 0.18% of the population, are already dead. Wouldn't that imply 0.9% fatalities if the whole city was infected?

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

#395
post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

> 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. The third option is, when you take into account that it's approximately as bad as the flu for folks under 40, we let out the young and keep the older folks a…

You can't have it both ways. If IFR is low, then that means R0 is way higher than we thought, which also means isolating only the vulnerable will not work.

The fact is, the number of deaths is too high in NYC to be able to cherry-pick your way to an argument that supports your view. Either R0 is really high, and we need to shutdown to prevent it from infecting the entire population in a very short time span, or the IFR is way higher than the flu and we need to shutdown to prevent it from killing a lot of people.

The only sane way to open things back up at this point is to implement widespread testing and contract tracing.

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

#396
post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. The third option is, when you take into account that it's approximately as bad as the flu for folks under 40, we let out the young and keep the older folks a…

I have never heard of any healthy person under 40 dying from purely the flu. COVID-19 is certainly less dangerous to the young than the old, but there are plenty examples of it killing young and otherwise healthy people.

See: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2018-2019.html

Search for "Table 1: Estimated influenza disease burden, by age group — United States, 2018-2019 influenza season"

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

#397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if 100% of the USA gets it at 330 M people that amounts to: 1,650,000 deaths. It is unlikely 100% will catch it from a single wave however.

Which is about 1/2 of what die in a normal year. The real question is how much do those circles overlap. Are we saving lives, or are people now dying in June that would have died in November anyway?

Yes more people will live if they have access to care because the system isn’t overwhelmed. People in the later stages will also benefit from the institutional knowledge hospitals gain from treating patients. There will also be more PPE and essential medication that will make treatment more effective. Time is our ally.

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

#398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. The third option is, when you take into account that it's approximately as bad as the flu for folks under 40, we let out the young and keep the older folks a…

You can't have it both ways. If IFR is low, then that means R0 is way higher than we thought, which also means isolating only the vulnerable will not work. The fact is, the number of deaths is too high in NYC to be able to cherry-pick your way to an argument that supports your view. Either R0 is really high, and we need to shutdown to prevent it from infecting the entire population in a very short time span, or the I…

[deleted]

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

#399
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's interesting is if you look at the rest of NY numbers (-NYC,LI,Westchester). That has infection at 3.6%. Santa Clara was estimated to be 3% and LA county 4%. So it's in strong agreement with those areas.

But the number of deaths does not agree.

There also appears to be a difference in the strains. The NYC strain seems to mostly come from the European branch, while the CA infection comes directly from China (and likely much earlier in 2020). There appears to be some difference in virulence between the strains.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.08.20056929v...

and

https://nextstrain.org/ncov/global

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

#400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a different argument. I'm saying that "lockdown until we have a vaccine or great treatment" might mean "lockdown until 2030". We already see heavy economic damages, civil unrest and riots after 4-8 weeks. Make that 40, 80 or 200 weeks and the world will be very different.

[flagged]

> Also nobody is arguing for "lockdown until we have a vaccine"

Some pepole in Italy were actually arguing for stronger limitations for 18-24 months until a vaccine was ready, and IIRC someone mentioned on HN a similar strategy (2 months closed - 1 months open) suggested for the UK.

So, there are people (in the authority chain) proposing for that. Whether they'll get listened to or not, it is another matter entirely. Personally I hope they don't.

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