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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

#651

Post by [deleted] »

greedo wrote: post #637
taeric wrote: post #582

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

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

#652

Post by CydeWeys »

cm2187 wrote: post #624
wtvanhest wrote: post #601

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m starting to believe that the difference in opinions on whether these studies are legitimate or not hinges heavily on personal behavior. For my wife and I and kid, we live in SF and order food when we can from grocery. When we can’t, I put on an N99 mask and gloves and buy 2 weeks worth of groceries. Then go through a ritual to be as safe as possible entering the home and bringing groceries in. If someone asks me…

I'm afraid the population who has these options (and spends its time on hackernews) is called the 1% for a reason, and probably aren't going to bias the stats significantly.

This doesn't make any sense. Grocery and food delivery is quite affordable. It's not only available to the top 1%. These options are being widely taken advantage of by a large number of people right now way down the economic spectrum. It's not a tiny minority of the wealthiest people patronizing them.

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

#653

Post by Mikeb85 »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #401
TheBlight wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> That's unfortunately not the way statistics works.

It absolutely is. That's why we have things like confidence intervals.

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

#654

Post by mlyle »

Gibbon1 wrote: post #361
mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually in reading closer and seeing the data is collected at big box & grocery stores, it’s almost surely very biased. This cohort would skew younger and wealthier, which correlates with better preexisting health and fewer risk factors, and would exclude populations who systematically left the city, or who have known heightened risk factors. Comparing the death rate overall with the infection rate of this skewed sa…

This weekend San Francisco plans to do a hard test of about 6000 people in a couple of square blocks of the Mission district. They are going door to door to encourage people to get tested. Still biased but probably better than anything so far.

Yup.. though it's unclear how much we'll clear the test sensitivity hurdle by.

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

#655

Post by timr »

zamfi wrote: post #619
timr wrote: post #611

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"In NY, the issue was not about wanting to be tested, it was about "are you there when they're picking people to test"" It's the same critique. If you pick the people anywhere other than from their home, the argument is that they're not at home, therefore they're more likely to have it. OK, so how do you get them in their homes? If you solicit them on the internet, then there's sample bias because you're telling them…

> > you can at least try to account for the ways in which your sample is likely to be different from a truly random sample. > Right, as all legitimate researchers in this area do. Yeah, obviously we agree here. So: how do you effectively control for them in this case? That's my point. It's hard, and you haven't offered any mechanism for this particular case, just assurances that people who know what they're doing do…

"Am I understanding correctly that you're saying that because you can't get a perfectly random sample you shouldn't try to minimize selection bias?"

No, you're not. I was explaining why your argument is a truism in disguise.

"OK, this is the second time you've implied that I'm uninformed, or am acting in bad faith or with bad motives (or whatever "lowbrow reasons" means). None of these are true. I've ignored the personal nature of your vague dismissals up to now in the interest of conversation, but I'm done doing so."

I don't know if you're doing it in bad faith or not, but you're definitely making a highbrow lowbrow dismissal. You've set up an argument that can never be refuted, for reasons I've explained.

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

#656

Post by anthonypasq »

kevindong wrote: post #592
badfrog wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

The data that NYC publishes daily is super interesting since it breaks down cases/deaths by race, gender, age (group), and presence of underlying health conditions [1]. The gist of it is that the majority of deaths from COVID-19 were suffered by people who had some kind of other health issue. As of the most recent data (April 22 at 6pm), 61 deaths were from people with no underlying health issues, 7,474 from people k…

The majority of people are unhealthy

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

#657

Post by __blockcipher__ »

nodamage wrote: post #481
__blockcipher__ wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> As others have said, for those around age 45 or less, Covid is equally or less dangerous than Influenza. And particular for those under 30 the flu is an order of magnitude more deadly at least. Can you share the specific numbers you used to reach this conclusions? The reason I ask is because I'm seeing a lot of people in this thread comparing: 1) Overall influenza fatality rates to age stratified Covid fatality rat…

I’ll try to dig up some sources later today. But briefly, on second thought “under 30” was sloppy of me to say and so that statement is probably false. I would expect for those 25-30 years old they should fall outside the range where Influenza kills a lot. So I think the order of magnitude is almost certainly true for those under 18, but I am now doubting it holds all the way up to age 30.

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

#658

Post by filoleg »

koheripbal wrote: post #644
JackFr wrote: post #616

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Half of the people I know are working from home and stocked up on 1-2 months of food at the outset of this. Seriously? Your personal network is evidence the this study is useless because of sampling bias? Everyone I know voted for Hilary Clinton and yet here we are. > People who are shopping in stores are absolutely a very biased sample. People who have jobs that allow them to work from home are a very biased sampl…

> People who have jobs that allow them to work from home are a very biased sample. Yes, exactly. ...just like the study's data that excludes them. That's my point.

Sure, I agree with you, excluding them is biased as well. A more appropriate phrase to be used to describe "people who have jobs that allow them to work from home" is "a small minority".

And let's be real, biasing your sample by not including a small minority doesn't affect the outcome of a study nearly as much as doing the opposite and sampling mostly from that small minority. Does it make the results less accurate? Yes. Does it make the results nearly as inaccurate as it would be if they excluded most of people but that minority? Not at all.

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

#659

Post by taeric »

greedo wrote: post #637
taeric wrote: post #582

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Depends what the compromise is. And a lot of my view depends on if I had it. I can't get tested, as that isn't offered here. I definitely had something that made walking pneumonia seem like a cake walk. And whatever I had, it was barely a fever on my kids and wife. That said, I am glad I had my inhaler and access to steroids. Without those, I'm confident I would be much worse off today. (Indeed, my emergency inhaler was empty. Had to call in an emergency refill and was basically bed confined waiting on that.)

Closing schools was pitched at the time with a wide net, granted. Such that I could just be misremembering some of it. As a way of protecting the older workers in there, though, it feels weak. As more evidence comes out that it was wide spread by the time the schools closed, it also feels too late for that aim. (Again, this largely depends on if me and my family had it. If so, it had passed through all of us before closures happened.)

Not sure why you think I am bad faith posting. I am posting mainly from my phone, so I suspect some of my parts are bad quality. But if you think I am twisting your point in bad faith, I do not intend that.

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

#660

Post by zamfi »

timr wrote: post #655
zamfi wrote: post #619

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> > you can at least try to account for the ways in which your sample is likely to be different from a truly random sample. > Right, as all legitimate researchers in this area do. Yeah, obviously we agree here. So: how do you effectively control for them in this case? That's my point. It's hard, and you haven't offered any mechanism for this particular case, just assurances that people who know what they're doing do…

"Am I understanding correctly that you're saying that because you can't get a perfectly random sample you shouldn't try to minimize selection bias?" No, you're not. I was explaining why your argument is a truism in disguise. "OK, this is the second time you've implied that I'm uninformed, or am acting in bad faith or with bad motives (or whatever "lowbrow reasons" means). None of these are true. I've ignored the pers…

> You've set up an argument that can never be refuted, for reasons I've explained.

I'm arguing that the selection mechanisms they're choosing to use are bad compared to what they could and should be using, namely, random sampling as was used in Germany. Yes, those still have problems as you've mentioned, but they are much better overall. I'm sure there are reasons these studies didn't use those mechanisms -- some bad, like that it's hard to get a good random sample, and it's easy to run facebook ads or camp out at a grocery store, and probably some good, like that it's easier enough that it makes results available sooner.

I'm also arguing that because of this bias, and because we are now seeing a few of these studies with similar biases despite different methodologies, and because, of the papers we could read (namely just Stanford's), the accounting for selection bias is weak, it's risky to make statements about trends indicated by these papers.

You could refute my argument by explaining how these not-very-random selection mechanisms could be effectively accounted for post-selection. I've asked you to do this several times, and you have not done so.

I am not making an argument that can never be refuted. I'm asking you to refute it, and I've given you one potential argument, and you have chosen not to do so, repeatedly.

I'm sorry, but in this exchange, the person putting forth arguments that amount to vague dismissals that can't be refuted was, um, not me.

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