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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

#671

Post by klmadfejno »

TheCowboy wrote: post #603
SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's a very real dichotomy. People won't literally starve in the US, but waiting in a bread line for hours is very different than feeding your family through your own money and effort.

No, this is a very fake dichotomy. The array of options available to society is not "starve" vs. "waiting in a bread line for hours" vs. "feeding your family" as can be seen by countries that have approached this problem differently. And lemon zest isn't spicy.

Relatively few people will starve "to death". But a significant number of people are already not getting enough food before the crisis: https://www.rt.com/usa/314881-usa-households-not-enough-food...

If food prices increase, and people lose jobs, more people will suffer food insecurity. This problem is MUCH worse in poorer countries for obvious reasons.

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

#672

Post by mlyle »

Gibbon1 wrote: post #668
mlyle wrote: post #666

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Retesting positives won't work because we don't know whether it's independent. If there's some rare common cold coronavirus antibodies that some of the population has, that set off the test, they'll still have them later. Not sure how well having the Bay Area do one thing, and large chunks of the rest of the country dash to herd immunity is going to work.

I think team herd immunity is going to have a rough time of it.

The alternative is pretty crummy, unless we get very lucky with a vaccine-- it basically requires permanent restrictions.

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

#673

Post by mlyle »

mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #667
mlyle wrote: post #646

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and in most cases the test specificity is on par with the incidence rate itself, ????? We can't exclude that specificity may be 97% (it's unlikely, based on our data, but it's at the edge of the confidence interval), which is unfortunately on par with the studies returning 2-4% positives... but can't exactly explain a return of 21%. Subtract off 4% worst-case false positives from 21%, and where are you? Since you w…

From the same Gelman article: > First off, 3% does not sound implausible. If they said 30%, I’d be skeptical, given how everyone’s been hiding out for awhile, but 3%, sure, maybe so.

Yes. 3% does not sound implausible (for the Bay Area). Just like he says 20% does not sound implausible (for New York).

Have you ever been diagnosed with reading comprehension issues?

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

#674

Post by Slartie »

treis wrote: post #321
Slartie wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As an example, 90% of patients that go on ventilators still die. That’s in New York, and probably because they only put the really worst cases on ventilators because there weren’t enough ventilators. In Germany, that number of deaths on ventilators is at around 30%. This shows that this quota is entirely useless to make your argument, and that maybe you should curb your intuition a bit when it comes to estimating p…

Do you have a cite for that 30% number?

Sorry, just saw your request. I'm taking that number from the Robert Koch Intitute daily status reports, which is basically the central official report regarding COVID-19 in Germany.

Here's the one from today (in English): https://www.rki.de/DE/Content/InfAZ/N/Neuartiges_Coronavirus...

The interesting table is on page 6, where there's the percentage of ventilated patients on ICU, which is 73%, so we know most ICU patients are ventilated, which means we can treat someone being on ICU as roughly equal to someone being ventilated. Right below is the number of discharges from ICU, and the percentage of deaths, which is 30% of all discharges. Since almost all ICU patients end up being ventilated, we can conclude that these about 30% of deaths mostly happened on ventilation, and most of the 70% recoveries also happened on ventilation.

I know that my calculation doesn't exactly result in the real percentage of deaths on ventilation, but the error range of my estimation does not allow the actual percentage of deaths on ventilation to even come close to 90%.

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

#675

Post by vannevar »

zaroth wrote: post #661
vannevar wrote: post #645

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NYC did not particularly flatten their curve, and they did not see excess deaths due to lack of available care. I'm pretty sure all the family members of the people who died would regard their loved ones as "excess deaths". Your technocratic language ascribes no value to the lives lost, in which case of course the actions seem excessive. For people who don't value the lives of others, it would be hard to understand a…

So the most charitable interpretation of my comment is to convince yourself I’m a sociopath? Excess deaths is a term of art to describe a number of deaths over a baseline. It can be used in general, or specifically, as I was using it, to describe the repercussions of an overloaded health care system. Here, for example, is a Sky News story from today using the term in its headline . [1] I think you owe me an apology,…

However you choose to define the term "excess deaths", the fact remains that there are tens of thousands of people alive today who would be dead if we all took your advice and ignored the notion of social distancing. Does that make you a sociopath? No, it simply makes you wrong, policy-wise, if you value human life. Unless you really are a sociopath, and advocate the policy precisely because you don't value those lives. I can either give you the benefit of the doubt morally, or intellectually. Which do you prefer?

You are correct that social distancing and flattening the curve protects the health care system from overloading. That doesn't mean that it is the only purpose, or effect. If we took a poll among health care policymakers about the benefits of flattening the curve, I'd be happy to bet any amount you'd like to wager that "buying time to develop effective treatments or a vaccine" would be on their list.

This is the key takeaway from “flattening the curve”. It cannot and will not decrease the total number of people who are ultimately exposed at this stage of the pandemic.

This is just mathematically untrue. There is clearly a point where the curve is so flattened that the number of deaths under it is less than a baseline "no action" scenario. If we could somehow get everyone in the US to truly isolate for three weeks, the virus would die out entirely. So clearly there is a spectrum of actions and their corresponding outcomes. The number of infected (and dead) is not a fixed number with only the duration of the outbreak changing.

If your premise were simply that the current measures are unsustainable, I couldn't agree more. Fortunately, those measures have bought us the time to take more focused, informed action based on the latest data. In a crisis this fast-moving, every day is time to update the policy.

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

#676

Post by Gibbon1 »

mlyle wrote: post #672
Gibbon1 wrote: post #668

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think team herd immunity is going to have a rough time of it.

The alternative is pretty crummy, unless we get very lucky with a vaccine-- it basically requires permanent restrictions.

If you can get the infection rate down enough so it doesn't overwhelm your ability to do testing and contact tracing you can relax restrictions.

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

#677

Post by mlyle »

Gibbon1 wrote: post #676
mlyle wrote: post #672

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The alternative is pretty crummy, unless we get very lucky with a vaccine-- it basically requires permanent restrictions.

If you can get the infection rate down enough so it doesn't overwhelm your ability to do testing and contact tracing you can relax restrictions.

A little, but not anything close to what we consider normalcy. And you get to maintain them forever, or until a vaccine arrives.

Of course, our case count is so high right now. If you get Rt down to a miraculous 0.5, it's like 180 days before you can get to the point where contact tracing is effective. And you probably don't achieve an Rt of 0.5.

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

#678

Post by treis »

Slartie wrote: post #674
treis wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a cite for that 30% number?

Sorry, just saw your request. I'm taking that number from the Robert Koch Intitute daily status reports, which is basically the central official report regarding COVID-19 in Germany. Here's the one from today (in English): https://www.rki.de/DE/Content/InfAZ/N/Neuartiges_Coronavirus... The interesting table is on page 6, where there's the percentage of ventilated patients on ICU, which is 73%, so we know most ICU pat…

>so we know most ICU patients are ventilated

This is where your logic fails. Most patients in the ICU at this point in time are ventilated. That doesn't (necessarily) mean that most patients that went to the ICU were ventilated. Those that are ventilated will stay in the ICU for weeks. Those that aren't might only be there for a few days.

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

#679

Post by Slartie »

treis wrote: post #678
Slartie wrote: post #674

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, just saw your request. I'm taking that number from the Robert Koch Intitute daily status reports, which is basically the central official report regarding COVID-19 in Germany. Here's the one from today (in English): https://www.rki.de/DE/Content/InfAZ/N/Neuartiges_Coronavirus... The interesting table is on page 6, where there's the percentage of ventilated patients on ICU, which is 73%, so we know most ICU pat…

>so we know most ICU patients are ventilated This is where your logic fails. Most patients in the ICU at this point in time are ventilated. That doesn't (necessarily) mean that most patients that went to the ICU were ventilated. Those that are ventilated will stay in the ICU for weeks. Those that aren't might only be there for a few days.

That uncertainty is why I already considered my calculation to be a rough estimate with a relatively large error window. But it is not large enough to allow the true percentage to even come close to 90%. For that, huge numbers of patients would have to be in ICU for a single day only, which is a ridiculous assumption.
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