Preliminary test results suggest 21% of NYC residents have Covid antibodies • Hacker News Board

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

#401

Post by Karrot_Kream » Thu, Apr 23, 2020, 9:47 PM UTC

TheBlight wrote: post #348

aazaa wrote: 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…

> Sure all of these studies are potentially flawed but they're all generally pointing in the same direction

That's unfortunately not the way statistics works. Combining multiple bad tests just makes the results incorrect or highly uncertain; the devil often is in the details. The Stanford/Santa Clara County study is a good example of how the details can really undermine a study.

Things do indeed seem to be converging to the idea that the CFR is not near the IFR, but none of this is new news, and the IFR remains very close to what most epidemiological predictions indicated early last month. If anything, it confirms that COVID is a difficult beast to tame.

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

#402

Post by nostromo » Thu, Apr 23, 2020, 9:48 PM UTC

__blockcipher__ wrote: post #387

slg wrote: 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.

At this point people advocating the position you’re advocating for are in a state of denial (this is my opinion, not a matter of fact, obviously). Your assumption is that we can effectively prevent the majority of the nation from exposure via lockdown. Not only does evidence seem to point against that, but when you do the math on mortality due to suicide and overdose it’s not clear that containment would even save mo…

> when you do the math on mortality due to suicide and overdose it’s not clear that containment would even save more lives in the long run.

I'm waiting for people to do the analysis of mass unemployment from lockdown leading to people losing their healthcare, just in time for the pandemic to widen or return this summer or fall.

You're exactly right to consider all of the externalities of our current approach.

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

#403

Post by mlyle » Thu, Apr 23, 2020, 9:48 PM UTC

__blockcipher__ wrote: post #387

slg wrote: 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.

At this point people advocating the position you’re advocating for are in a state of denial (this is my opinion, not a matter of fact, obviously). Your assumption is that we can effectively prevent the majority of the nation from exposure via lockdown. Not only does evidence seem to point against that, but when you do the math on mortality due to suicide and overdose it’s not clear that containment would even save mo…

Hey, I'm in broad agreement with you, but, a nit ...

> Here’s how you can tell people’s philosophical positions: if they talk about fear of a “second wave” they are Containers, since that implies the initial “wave” will not infect the majority; ie the virus is successfully contained.

Here in the SF Bay Area we pretty effectively blunted the first wave with public health controls, which meant health care was not stressed much. Despite the Stanford serosurvey saying that we have 3% with a history of infection, the real number is probably more like 1%. Daily case counts are decreasing, so the initial "wave' did not infect the majority.

It's not enough to decrease Rt noticeably at all. We need to figure out how to loosen up controls in a way that provides economic benefits, keeps a nice constantish burn towards herd immunity, but with enough safety margin to prevent catastrophe that New York got too close to.

Instead, our public health seems to be further tightening instead of experimenting with small measures to relax the controls. There's a loud contingent advocating what would effectively be permanent controls.

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

#404

Post by mlyle » Thu, Apr 23, 2020, 9:50 PM UTC

qqqwerty wrote: post #395

arcticbull wrote: post #366

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…

> If IFR is low, then that means R0 is way higher than we thought, which also means isolating only the vulnerable will not work.

No. If you miss a constant percentage of cases, you get the same shape of exponential curve.

That is, a virus with an R0 of 2 and 1 case doubling to 2 and 2 cases doubling to 4.... looks the same when you miss 99% of infections and see 1 of 100 infections doubling to 2 of 200 doubling to 4 of 400.

This fallacy has been common in the response to this data, but it makes no sense. Large numbers of missed cases shift the curve forward and backward in time, and don't change the shape of it.

All of the current findings are still consistent with R0 in the range of 2.0 to 2.5.

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

#405

Post by slg » Thu, Apr 23, 2020, 9:52 PM UTC

TheBlight wrote: post #396

slg wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

I skimmed through that so please point it out if I missed it, but the numbers don't seem to account for comorbidities. The question was whether COVID-19 is more dangerous than the flu to healthy young people not all young people.

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

#406

Post by nateberkopec » Thu, Apr 23, 2020, 9:52 PM UTC

hcknwscommenter wrote: post #349

arrrg wrote: 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.

It is very positive in that we can be more confident that our assumptions are close to reality. 0.5%*330M still equals 1.65M deaths, or (very roughly) 5M ICU beds. Spread out over 52 weeks, that's a lot of ventilators and ICU beds and PPE, but it is a target. A very big juicy target that we can and should aim directly at, and HIT.

It's more or less epidemiologically impossible that you will see an attack rate of 100% (as you just assumed). Once attack rate reaches >40~60%, the reproduction number drops below 1 because there just aren't enough uninfected hosts.

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

#407

Post by usaar333 » Thu, Apr 23, 2020, 9:54 PM UTC

t2riRXawYxLGGYb wrote: post #326

aazaa wrote: 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…

This was my thought exactly. Some of my friends in the Bay area got COVID-19 (confirmed positive tests) after quarantining for over two weeks at home and taking all of the precautions. The only place they had been was the grocery store, so they suspect that they got it there.

Are they not taking public transit? Your friends must be some of the most unlucky people ever. The Bay Area has had under 3k cases since the start of April outside group living settings (nursing homes, homeless shelters, etc.). That's ~1/2000 chance of getting covid from anywhere outside.

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

#408

Post by dktoao » Thu, Apr 23, 2020, 9:54 PM UTC

__blockcipher__ wrote: post #387

slg wrote: 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.

At this point people advocating the position you’re advocating for are in a state of denial (this is my opinion, not a matter of fact, obviously). Your assumption is that we can effectively prevent the majority of the nation from exposure via lockdown. Not only does evidence seem to point against that, but when you do the math on mortality due to suicide and overdose it’s not clear that containment would even save mo…

Thanks for this comment, puts into words what I have been casually thinking. Also, this is the strategy in Sweden, seems to be working out fine for them.

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

#409

Post by caoilte » Thu, Apr 23, 2020, 9:57 PM UTC

wh1t3n01s3 wrote: post #388

shironineja wrote: post #346

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.

Herd immunity will cap the total %! The second wave will be less contagious where current infection rate is higher.

You don't get herd immunity until you hit at least 70%so that isn't very reassuring

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

#410

Post by slg » Thu, Apr 23, 2020, 9:57 PM UTC

__blockcipher__ wrote: post #387

slg wrote: 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.

At this point people advocating the position you’re advocating for are in a state of denial (this is my opinion, not a matter of fact, obviously). Your assumption is that we can effectively prevent the majority of the nation from exposure via lockdown. Not only does evidence seem to point against that, but when you do the math on mortality due to suicide and overdose it’s not clear that containment would even save mo…

I agree with some of what you said here, but there is one specific point I want to disagree with. All the projections for unemployment related deaths are based on society functioning as it previously did. I think many of the people who are suggesting we are in for long term isolation are also suggesting a much bigger increase in the social safety net to help people through these difficult times.