31–40 of 649 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think antibody tests will soon become more useful for tracking disease progression in a population than the viral tests. The collection methods may skew things but they still are much more close to a random sample than the viral tests which have lots of issues with test shortages and people unable to get tested (or not wanting to go to the hospital with mild symptoms).
They have huge false positive rates though.
Before the deluge of "But wait two weeks" comments, I just want to ask at what point we accept that the potentially of totally asymptomatic cases is insanely high, far higher than anyone thought?
I also want to add that this doesn't make the virus less deadly. It just gives it a very population varied IFR. It appears far more deadly for some populations. Near harmless for others. But no clear way to confine it to the harmless crowd.
That won't be what the public policy decisions will be based around if the asymptomatic and already exposed rate is so high.
We don't know enough to make that decision yet, but testing more broadly was the first step.
Remaining steps:
- Do they get sick in two weeks?
- Skip testing for current sickness, and test for antibodies instead.
- Get a better antibody test that is more accurate
- Understand how well antibodies work, and for how long
and then we can make decisions, even if they are as simple as "this is a systemwide over the air update, some people will get bricked"
it's becoming clear that we might end up with a society where the average BMI is under 24.9 simply due to the lower oxygen and resource requirements to support those body systems.
Before the deluge of "But wait two weeks" comments, I just want to ask at what point we accept that the potentially of totally asymptomatic cases is insanely high, far higher than anyone thought?
Like with the death rate, I expect we'll seamlessly transition from "this isn't proof, in 2 weeks you'll see" to "this isn't news, everyone always believed that so it doesn't imply any changes in strategy".
A lot of this is like Russian Roulette -- there's a huge amount about this virus which we don't know, and it could be super-bad or not-that-bad. It could also be there are bad and not-so-bad strains. Or it could be bad down-the-line.
Until we do have proof, I'm advocating being conservative. In 2 weeks, we'll know if people are turning up in ERs or in morgues. In a few months, we'll know about lung damage, immune system damage, strokes, or a lot of the other potential consequences. In a year, we'll know about vaccine and long-term immunity.
I think the key problem here is failure to understand risk management. I can believe one think, but act another way just in case I'm wrong. Or I can be unsure. And so on. That nuance is lost in the right/wrong discussions.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think antibody tests will soon become more useful for tracking disease progression in a population than the viral tests. The collection methods may skew things but they still are much more close to a random sample than the viral tests which have lots of issues with test shortages and people unable to get tested (or not wanting to go to the hospital with mild symptoms).
They have huge false positive rates though.
Isn't this a bit of promising news, means herd immunity is probably much deeper and larger than we are currently aware.
WHO says we can't assume previous infection means future immunity. https://www.who.int/news-room/commentaries/detail/immunity-p...
I've been tracking the antibody study results in a spreadsheet, and they are suggesting a 10-20x undercount of cases in the official "confirmed" numbers. You can see the data I've collected here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/16onEUBWIV5IqN1RCvTla...
I wonder which tests they used? A recent study is finding that some antibody tests are much better than others when it comes to false positives: https://tildes.net/~health.coronavirus/o6a/coronavirus_antib...
I don't know what tests the other studies used.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think antibody tests will soon become more useful for tracking disease progression in a population than the viral tests. The collection methods may skew things but they still are much more close to a random sample than the viral tests which have lots of issues with test shortages and people unable to get tested (or not wanting to go to the hospital with mild symptoms).
They have huge false positive rates though.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think antibody tests will soon become more useful for tracking disease progression in a population than the viral tests. The collection methods may skew things but they still are much more close to a random sample than the viral tests which have lots of issues with test shortages and people unable to get tested (or not wanting to go to the hospital with mild symptoms).
They have huge false positive rates though.
Isn't this a bit of promising news, means herd immunity is probably much deeper and larger than we are currently aware.
WHO says we can't assume previous infection means future immunity. https://www.who.int/news-room/commentaries/detail/immunity-p...