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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

#501

Post by greedo »

ineedasername wrote: post #310
Retric wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

The amount of testing for influenza is nugatory. Most of the CDC data is collected by surveys, not tests.

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

#502

Post by yibg »

taeric wrote: post #199
kgwgk wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the IFR will be lower in the rest of the country than in NYC because... they are going to send everyone over seventy to the Moon or something?

No. I was not claiming it would be lower. Apologies if the framing said it that way. I was just pointing out that we really don't have bounds on this anywhere else.

I'm not sure how that matters. We have a lower bound for an optimistic demographic representation of the country. If NYC is younger and healthier than average and is at 0.2%, why would the lower bound for the country as a whole be lower?

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

#503

Post by nodamage »

themgt wrote: post #466
scythe wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In comparing the COVID-19 IFR to the flu IFR, it is important to remember that flu vaccines are widely available and limit the spread of influenza. For example, CDC retrospectives for 2018-9 estimate that 35M Americans[1] got influenza over the flu season, or less than 12%. By contrast, the current COVID-19 infection rate in New York (from these data) is already higher than 12%. So COVID-19 has the potential to infec…

It's actually important to point out, the CDC is very explicit that they are estimating flu illnesses , in their own words "an estimated 34 million people had symptomatic influenza illness" Many people are attempting to extrapolate asymptomatic COVID to estimate an infection fatality rate and then making comparisons to CDC flu data for symptomatic illness, which is completely wrong. Actual flu sero studies suggest a…

Yes this is happening all over this thread and is absolutely not a valid comparison. I'm also seeing people compare age-stratified Covid rates with overall flu fatality rates which is also invalid for similar reasons.

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

#504

Post by greedo »

CodeWriter23 wrote: post #431
ineedasername wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those are the people who constitute the denominator for the CFR. It's a completely different metric. You would never try to impute population exposure from such cases. This study is trying to to impute population exposure. There isn't any comparison between the two in terms of which has more/less selection bias, they are completely different things.

Didn’t stop the news media from tabulating a death rate based on hospital cases alone.

That's because all of the statistical reporting is whacked up across the globe. The only thing that can reasonably be measured now is CFR. Without extensive, reliable serological testing with high specificity, IFR can only be guessed at.

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

#505

Post by Lukman »

__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…

>In the general population overall, Covid is undeniably more deadly than the flu, but only about 3-5x (and I think 3x personally right now).

I don't see how you get close to 3X more deadly than the flu. If 14% of New York state residents have been infected, 20M population, 15000 deaths + another 3000 that are infected now and will die (this disease takes a long time to kill people) you get an IFR of 0.64. If the IFR for flu is 0.05, that makes covid 12X more deadly than the flu.

Lots of people reporting an IFR of 0.5 based on the NY serological data; that is "right censoring" the deaths. It's got to be a bit higher than that. Either way you have covid with 10X the infection fatality rate of the flu. If worst flu years have IFR of 0.1 then covid is still 5X worse than the worse flu seasons. And as contagious as the worst flu seasons too.

So twice as contagious as the flu, 10X deadly. Much more likely to put you in the hospital, and thus overwhelm the hospital system, causing many ancillary deaths. This NYTimes article sums it up: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/06/well/live/coronavirus-doc...

At the peak in NY, hospitals stopped seeing heart attacks and strokes, because those people were too afraid to go to the hospital. Many of those people died at home, as supported by the overall death rates in NY.

The narrative put out there by those that look at the recent serology results and say "this proves that this disease was really just a bad flu all along; we can reopen the economy without fear" is just not supported by the data. An IFR of 0.64 and hospitalization rate of double that, like 1.2%, for a disease this contagious, shuts down the economy until we get a vaccine or effective treatment or a Korea-like testing/tracing regime in place.

And one more thing: the Great Depression was great for public health. https://www.pnas.org/content/106/41/17290

Yes suicides go up. But this is more than compensated for by other benefits. Overall, people may well be much healthier in a depressed economy. We will certainly see a decline in car accidents.

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

#506

Post by greedo »

credit_guy wrote: post #122
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…

Yes, the study is really good news for NYC. My thinking is that the state of emergency, currently in place until 5/15, will be extended at most once to 6/15. After that we'll be somewhat open for business. I imagine everyone will be advised to wear mask/gloves, to keep the social distance and to keep washing hands. Lots of people will continue to work from home, others will bike to work. Being summer, the virus will…

CFR has been steadily rising in Germany. Perhaps you want to cherry pick another country?

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

#507

Post by robocat »

credit_guy wrote: post #494
hcknwscommenter wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just far from certain. It is simply unlikely. The "hypotheses" for explaining seasonal variations in transmissibility are nothing but a wild-guess/hope.

Kinshasa, the capital of DR Congo, is a city with 11 million people. About the same size as Wuhan or New York City. According to [1] there were only 25 deaths due to Covid19 in the whole country. Why so few? 21 million people live in Lagos, Nigeria, yet the whole of Nigeria has seen only 31 deaths. On the other hand, I have to admit, there were quite a bit more deaths in Sao Paolo, Brazil, but it's still an order of…

Jakarta and Istanbul have a huge rise in deaths, similar to European countries, but they have suspiciously low recorded numbers of deaths officially due to Covid. http://archive.vn/vOoRp

It looks to me like you are cherry picking data, and wrapping it up to appear objective. Looking at “case” numbers from countries with poor heath systems is especially misleading. Australia could be an outlier. Jakarta and Istanbul are better proof that temperature is not that important.

My prior is that I have seen lots of people use the “temperature” argument because they want to believe it, which trumps your prior, wink.

Edit: Note that science is mostly about finding counter-examples to a hypothesis. Jakarta is a good counter-examples to the hypothesis “Covid is not much of a problem in hot temperatures”. Istanbul was not (it is actually tepid there in March). And this brings up some other counter-examples: https://thehill.com/homenews/coronavirus-report/494428-trump...

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

#508

Post by jnbiche »

themgt wrote: post #466
scythe wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In comparing the COVID-19 IFR to the flu IFR, it is important to remember that flu vaccines are widely available and limit the spread of influenza. For example, CDC retrospectives for 2018-9 estimate that 35M Americans[1] got influenza over the flu season, or less than 12%. By contrast, the current COVID-19 infection rate in New York (from these data) is already higher than 12%. So COVID-19 has the potential to infec…

It's actually important to point out, the CDC is very explicit that they are estimating flu illnesses , in their own words "an estimated 34 million people had symptomatic influenza illness" Many people are attempting to extrapolate asymptomatic COVID to estimate an infection fatality rate and then making comparisons to CDC flu data for symptomatic illness, which is completely wrong. Actual flu sero studies suggest a…

>IFR is more like 0.02->0.05%, so even taking NYC numbers at face value COVID looks 10-50x more fatal than flu.

Exactly, my only point in mentioning approximate flu IFR was to demonstrate that it's significantly lower than flu CFR. And so the NY COVID-19 serological study suggests a CFR well above 1%.

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

#509

Post by greedo »

qqqwerty wrote: post #365
electricviolet wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the infection rate were 50% we would be close to herd immunity (which I've read would require about 70% for this virus), so that would be better news in a sense. Unfortunately 21% is a long way from 70%, and it's taken a massive amount of death to get to that point.

The R0 value impacts herd immunity %. So if NYC is already at 50%, then it means R0 is much higher than we thought, which means herd immunity would probably be as high as +90%. With numbers like that, not shutting down would result in the entire population getting infected in the span of a month or two. The point I was trying to make, was that for the 'open back up' crowd, they are arguing that the IFR is similar to…

Also, protecting the vulnerable sounds simple, but is incredibly difficult in practice.

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

#510

Post by glofish »

__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…

Excellent summary. Thanks for taking the time to write it up.
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