Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

6sqft.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

631–640 of 679 posts

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

#631

Post by mlthoughts2018 »

mlyle wrote: post #594
mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #573

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re completely missing the point. The selection effects would be things like able-bodied / non-immunocompromised / already-recovered people being selected way higher, which would inflate the apparent infected population size estimate and underestimate the death rate among those infected. This is not some snooty tech point of view - this kind of flaw in statistical studies matters a lot. The more important the poli…

I don't think anyone disagrees that the sample has bias. On the other hand, since the majority of people have no choice but to grocery shop in person, I do not think the sample is as tilted as you imply. And even if it were--- it's notable that it's this easy to find a subgroup with cleared infections this far above what was anticipated to be found across NY/NYC. And-- it's remarkably consistent with statistical esti…

> “ since the majority of people have no choice but to grocery shop in person”

This is deeply flawed.

I live in NYC and have been making donations to have food delivered to elderly people since this started.

Just the other day, de Blasio announced that taxi and rideshare drivers would be paid by the city to deliver food - and city agencies would be serving as overflow dispatchers and tech support for it.

Many, many people do not have to go to the grocery store, or they have their healthy younger family member go in their place, etc.

To boot, as Gelman has written on his blog, these studies do not agree with a wide range of other studies, and in most cases the test specificity is on par with the incidence rate itself, making incidence rate estimates from _all_ of the studies very unreliable for correlated reasons, so that pooling the studies does nothing to overcome the huge uncertainty they suffer in incidence rates.

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

#632

Post by vannevar »

zaroth wrote: post #416
vannevar wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to the CDC web site, those numbers are 35.5M flu cases and 34,200 deaths ( https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2018-2019.html ), giving an IFR of more like 0.1%. Which would put COVID-19 at more like 5-6x more fatal than the flu. Combine that with the virtually complete lack of natural and vaccinated resistance compared to the flu, and it's clear that the potential fatality totals for COVID-19, absent dras…

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…

"... it's not clear at all what our "drastic action" is achieving..."

It's no coincidence that the city that shows a much higher prevalence also experienced a much more acute infection, straining their medical infrastructure. That isn't evidence that social distancing doesn't work, it's evidence that the infection was already well on its way before social distancing was implemented there. NYC was the canary in the coal mine that triggered social distancing across the US, and as a result the experience in NYC has not been repeated elsewhere. Aside from the results, which should speak for themselves, the epidemiological connection between R0 and the prevailing rate of social interaction is clear, which is why it's accounted for in the models.

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

#633

Post by chasd00 »

DeonPenny wrote: post #614
Mikeb85 wrote: post #610

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I literally made the same comment a few days ago but here goes: every thread about a study such as this one is has criticisms concerning the scientific accuracy even though all these studies point to the same conclusion and not one of them provide evidence to the contrary. This isn't exact science, we're in the middle of a pandemic. But all these antibody studies are pointing towards the same conclusion.

I can't believe people are still screaming false results at this point every single random sampling has been the same or point to more infections. At this point based on everyone's method of random sampling that should merit the badge of random sampling, but people argue it on every post.

I agree. I'm not a conspiracy nut but it's getting hard to ignore the feeling ulterior motives are at work here.

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

#634

Post by standardUser »

tunesmith wrote: post #75
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…

Sorry, can someone spell out how this might be good news? 21% is still a long way from herd immunity, and NYC's hospital system has been severely strained getting to this point. On top of that, the hospitalization rate still seems disproportionate to someone getting the flu - maybe it's five times as fatal, but it's > 5x the flu hospitalization rate. It's not like the virus has become less dangerous, we're just reali…

Every person who is infected that we don't know about lowers the estimated hospitalization and mortality rates and reduces the ability of the virus to spread (for as long as immunity lasts in the individual).

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

#635

Post by standardUser »

3fe9a03ccd14ca5 wrote: post #20

At what point have we scientifically reached "herd immunity"? Is it 50%, 90%, 99%?

An important thing to keep in mind is that even without herd immunity, the transmission rate gets lower every time a person obtain long-lasting immunity (assuming such a thing typically occurs with this virus). Keeping the transmission rate down around 1 becomes increasingly easier and requires less severe protocols.

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

#636

Post by Symmetry »

greedo wrote: post #518
Symmetry wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope that the numbers stay at .6% and that the difference from previous estimates might even be improvements we've made in figuring out how to care for people suffering from Covid-19. But I remember being happy at how low South Korea's numbers were when their epidemic peaked and receded then watching the case fatality rate slowly climb up to the 2.2% it's at today. So I'm not counting any chickens just yet.

Be careful not to conflate CFR with IFR. CFR is the number of deaths divided by the number of confirmed cases. IFR is deaths divided by total infections. It's hard to determine IFR, but CFR is almost always an exaggeration of the risk.

Yeah, but with the success of contact tracing in South Korea I'm assuming IFR is within a factor of 2 of the CFR or so.

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

#637

Post by greedo »

taeric wrote: post #582
greedo wrote: post #522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"isolation measures for at risk groups" sound so easy. First, isolate the obese. Hmm, 30% in America so 98M. Next isolate diabetics. Roughly 35M. After this, isolate those with heart disease and hypertension. 30% in the US, 98M. Old people? 32M. Naturally there's some overlapping in these groups. We'll be generous and say that 98M is the lower bound. How on earth are you going to isolate 30% of the population?

This is making a lot of assumptions on what the at risk crowd is. Now, I confess I am also making assumptions there. Data would be nice. My assumptions are we could have saved a sizeable portion by tighter lockdowns on nursing homes. I also suspect we could have done things pre-infection to strengthen lungs of people with pre-existing lung conditions. More pointedly, I think all of the havoc we have caused by closing…

If you have compromised lung functionality, there's not much you can do to strengthen it against COVID.

Children aren't at risk, and that's not why schools were closed.

Your posts don't seem to be made in good faith. Either that or you are demonstrating a lack of information on par with Trump.

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

#638

Post by zaroth »

vannevar wrote: post #632
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…

"... it's not clear at all what our "drastic action" is achieving..." It's no coincidence that the city that shows a much higher prevalence also experienced a much more acute infection, straining their medical infrastructure. That isn't evidence that social distancing doesn't work, it's evidence that the infection was already well on its way before social distancing was implemented there. NYC was the canary in the co…

I actually agree with everything you said, but I still haven’t found the basis for the tremendously costly actions taken.

As we can see, NYC did not particularly flatten their curve, and they did not see excess deaths due to lack of available care. They already hit the endpoint prevalence that you would see with the flu in a very bad year.

It’s not clear how much further SARS-CoV-2 would go naturally — the S curve doesn’t ever go to 100%. But more importantly, without a vaccine, which we won’t see for 12-18 months, we are going to find out exactly how high the S curve goes.

We have a small degree of control over exactly when that happens by burning extremely large amounts of money. So, when do you want it to happen? Now, while flu is at its nadir, or after spending $10 trillion dollars perhaps we can see the final surge during the peak of the next flu season?

The fact is that there isn’t actually a known treatment for COVID, and even with treating the symptoms (invasive ventilation) 80% of people in the ICU will die. This isn’t a disease for which “flattening the curve” makes particular sense. That would require there actually be an effective treatment.

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

#639

Post by wtvanhest »

JackFr wrote: post #617
wtvanhest wrote: post #568

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m a resident of SF downtown and previously DC and Boston. Everyone I know has stopped leaving their apartments/condos except for fresh air and are trying not to go to any stores. When possible are having food delivered. My friends in NYC have all left except for one who has a large apartment and no family without taking a flight. I think people see these studies of places they visited once and determine that those…

Please stop using “everyone I know” as a data point, especially when criticizing someone else’s sampling bias. I am suffocating under the irony.

My point is that another set of pop exists that is not possible to test using the grocery store method.

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

#640

Post by klmadfejno »

wvenable wrote: post #350
klmadfejno wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been making many posts arguing against the efficacy of lockdowns (and been getting shat on by points I find mostly naive). I think something like this is probably the best approach because it minimizes economic harm while also trying to minimize hospitalization rates among the elderly. But even if we pretend we could implement a perfect bubble for everyone over 50, they're not especially safe when the lockdown i…

> But even if we pretend we could implement a perfect bubble for everyone over 50, they're not especially safe when the lockdown is lifted for them. The virus will still exist, and people over 50 tend to spend time with people over 50 (see: homophily). The point of the lock down is to prevent the spread of the virus from happening too fast and overwhelming the healthcare system. It is not to prevent people from ever…

That's what people say. That's not how it works.

If the lockdown is ineffective, there's not point in doing it so whatever.

If the lockdown is effective, you kill the exponential spread. This is good, but if there's no exponential spread, you haven't actually infected many people at all. When you lift the lockdown, you're close to the same level of vulnerability as when you began. For a virus like this, you likely cannot 'eradicate it' by keeping the lockdown ongoing.

There's no middle ground where you slowly build up immunity across the population at a level hospitals can support. We can't turn the economy off and on again until the virus has had burst spread either.

The lockdown makes a lot of sense for 3 reasons: to learn more about the disease, to gather more PPE for doctors, and to reformat critical systems to run with a healthier population. It's not a bad idea. But it's utility is going to run lower while the cost gets higher. We need to address that.

Post reply on HN