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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

#541

Post by bagacrap »

zaroth wrote: post #338
athrowaway3z wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

25% prevalence is absolutely not in line with what experts were saying on March 23rd. Nor was an IFR of 0.5%. The CDC reports that flu has an IFR of ~.13% in the US (61,000 deaths out of 45 million cases). That makes 0.5% roughly 3.3 times worse, not 10. Also, herd immunity does not require 100% having positive antibodies, it will show an effect on Ro starting around 65%.

it would show an effect on r0 immediately, but around 65 is when r0 would hit 1 (since it's got 2/3 fewer chances to spread and starts at about 3)

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

#542

Post by __blockcipher__ »

slg wrote: post #405
TheBlight wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I found the link I was looking for. Here’s some COVID numbers: https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/doh/downloads/pdf/imm/covid-19-d...

I’m on mobile right now so won’t be able to look up the influenza numbers, but perhaps you could find some quality data on influenza mortality in those without comorbidities?

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

#543

Post by zaroth »

Retric wrote: post #449
zaroth wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems the CDC has different data depending on where you look. The 45 million / 61,000 numbers are here, for the 2017-2018 season, see Figure 2: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html And on the page specifically for 2017-2018 season, they have different numbers still; "CDC early estimates indicate that more than 900,000 people were hospitalized and more than 80,000 people died from flu last season." https…

That 45 million in your first link is Symptomatic Illnesses which represent ~2/3 of total cases as Approximately 33% of people with influenza are asymptomatic . https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influenza So, total infections would be closer to 67.5 million. But, it’s important to keep things in context, another year lists 9.3 million symptomatic infections and 12,000 deaths. The average year is well below peak years.

Yeah, that lines up with the CDC saying flu prevalence is generally at most 20% including asymptomatic, and usually lower than that.

So, at least in NYC, SARS-CoV-2 is as prevalent today, if not more prevalent, than a bad flu season, and it’s not done yet.

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

#544

Post by monadic2 »

TheBlight wrote: post #420
monadic2 wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sure all of these studies are potentially flawed but they're all generally pointing in the same direction. How on earth could you differentiate this from the sample bias?

All three studies created their sample groups differently. Are all three methods flawed in some way? Sure. Is it more reasonable to completely ignore the picture all three are painting or to consider there might be something to the trend?

> Is it more reasonable to completely ignore the picture all three are painting or to consider there might be something to the trend?

The reasonable conclusion would be no conclusion. The comforting conclusion is to extrapolate a trend from noise.

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

#545

Post by DeonPenny »

tunesmith wrote: post #478
DeonPenny wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But if that held then we'd eradicate flu and the common cold two. Quarantines don't eradicate disease they slow the spread but the area under the curve is constant. I doubt will change the number of infected is a constant regardless of the rate.

That's only true if medical and technological advancements don't happen. A vaccine a year from now means less death if we've locked down in the meantime, compared to if we haven't locked down. Similarly, if we scale up testing and contact tracing to the point we can eventually eradicate the disease through targeted quarantines, a preceding lockdown means less death. If instead we don't experience any advancements, th…

Which for me the later seems more possible simply because vaccines from what I heard would take 5 years. Thinks like SARS and zika still have no vaccine despite being around for years.

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

#546

Post by koheripbal »

mannykannot wrote: post #499
wtvanhest wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Preliminary test results suggest 21% of NYC residents have Covid antibodies" Should be re-written as: "Preliminary test results suggest 21% of of people approached in a crowded grocery store and who would agree to give blood have Covid antibodies" All of these tests suffer the same sample bias, and that sample bias is massive. People who are already in a grocery store (risky behavior), who are willing to give a bloo…

NYC is not suburbia. I believe a higher percentage are still working outside of their homes (and, in many cases, that also means travelling on public transport), and a smaller percentage have the financial and transport resources to significantly reduce the frequency of their shopping trips. Apartment living means a greater exposure to your neighbors whenever you do enter or exit. The sampling in NYC, while far from…

As a (40-something) NYC resident, I don't believe that is accurate. Half of the people I know are working from home and stocked up on 1-2 months of food at the outset of this. The other half left the city and are now staying with friends/family in other states or have rented homes elsewhere.

Those that did stay and still need food (ie produce) are having it delivered.

People who are shopping in stores are absolutely a very biased sample.

Very specifically, this bias excludes older people who are locking themselves away very very judiciously.

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

#547

Post by koheripbal »

TheBlight wrote: post #420
monadic2 wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sure all of these studies are potentially flawed but they're all generally pointing in the same direction. How on earth could you differentiate this from the sample bias?

All three studies created their sample groups differently. Are all three methods flawed in some way? Sure. Is it more reasonable to completely ignore the picture all three are painting or to consider there might be something to the trend?

They are all flawed in the SAME way - they sampled people who they found outside their homes.

People 65+ are NOT leaving their homes.

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

#548

Post by thehappypm »

joe_maley wrote: post #239
thehappypm wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This data might suggest that the lockdowns suppressed the infection rate down to 20% at this moment in time. Without a lockdown, a month more of infections would have likely bumped NYC to achieving herd immunity, or 60-ish percent, since 20% to 60% does not take long with exponential growth. This means two things. One, it would mean that we would have almost certainly overwhelmed the hospitals with triple the rate of…

>It would also have meant that the curve would be flattened for good. I have yet to see any evidence that covid antibodies provide long-term immunity. We can't say with any certainty that the curve would be permanently flattened. It may just be flattened for a few weeks, a few months, or a few years.

With no long-term immunity, lockdowns need to be permanent until we have a vaccine or treatment. That's not feasible. If there's no immunity we might as well end the lockdowns.

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

#549

Post by dragonwriter »

godelski wrote: post #393
dragonwriter wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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".

> If a representative portion of the population didn't click on Facebook ads then Facebook wouldn't generate revenue from these ads.

No, if valuable advertising demographics didn't do that, Facebook wouldn't make money. Valuable advertising demographics and representative samples of the general population are very different things.

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

#550

Post by mannykannot »

koheripbal wrote: post #546
mannykannot wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NYC is not suburbia. I believe a higher percentage are still working outside of their homes (and, in many cases, that also means travelling on public transport), and a smaller percentage have the financial and transport resources to significantly reduce the frequency of their shopping trips. Apartment living means a greater exposure to your neighbors whenever you do enter or exit. The sampling in NYC, while far from…

As a (40-something) NYC resident, I don't believe that is accurate. Half of the people I know are working from home and stocked up on 1-2 months of food at the outset of this. The other half left the city and are now staying with friends/family in other states or have rented homes elsewhere. Those that did stay and still need food (ie produce) are having it delivered. People who are shopping in stores are absolutely…

Thanks for your observations. If, however, behavior in NYC is more or less the same as elsewhere, then what might account for the difference in the results between store-customer sampling in the city and elsewhere? The results may well be biased from sampling shoppers, but if the bias is assumed to be from shopping behavior, and that behavior is essentially the same everywhere, why does it not wash out?

One explanation might be that it got an earlier start in NYC, but both the hospitalizations and fatalities seem to have started showing up on about the same dates in the city and the surrounding suburbs.

There seems to be a significant ethnic variation, but ethnicity is such a correlate to other issues that it is not likely to be informative on its own.

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