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In 4 US state prisons, 3,300 inmates test positive, 96% without symptoms

reuters.com

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Re: In 4 US state prisons, 3,300 inmates test positive, 96% without symptoms

#91

Post by jfasi »

cwillu wrote: post #74
MrPatan wrote: post #43

Does anybody know the false positive rate of the test? Could this be an artifact of that plus low actual incidence like: - False positive rate of 10% - 100 tests - 1 true positives. All with symptoms - 9 false positives. All without symptoms (duh!) Headline: "90% asymptomatic!" Truth: "Shitty test procedure!" Yes, yes, I know you know this. Do you think people doing tests and writing headlines know this? What is the…

> They started with the Marion Correctional Institution, which houses 2,500 prisoners in north central Ohio, many of them older with pre-existing health conditions. After testing 2,300 inmates for the coronavirus, they were shocked. Of the 2,028 who tested positive, close to 95% had no symptoms.

This is the relevant response. What the commenter is trying to imply is that the authors of this study are so staggeringly stupid that they overlooked the possibility of false positives when designing this experiment.

In reality, this test would need a false positive rate of over eighty percent to explain this kind of asymptomatic infection rate.

Also, prisons are useful because due to the close quarters it can be taken as a given that a substantial proportion of the population is infected, further minimizing the danger of these sorts of errors. The choice of population suggests a sophisticated experiment design, and the commenter is implying that the study authors made a statistics 101-level error.

Re: In 4 US state prisons, 3,300 inmates test positive, 96% without symptoms

#92

Post by k2enemy »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #84

Lets not get too excited about this. Whatever the numbers, that's interesting and worth recording for planning. But whatever they are, they result in "way too many deaths". This is still a very dangerous and rapidly-spreading virus.

Where is the cutoff between "way too many deaths" and not too many deaths? I don't mean to be glib, but it is an important question that needs to be weighed against destroying all of our economic institutions.

Re: In 4 US state prisons, 3,300 inmates test positive, 96% without symptoms

#93

Post by bobongo »

cies wrote: post #30
marcell wrote: post #3

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 did similar calculations, and found the institutions in charge give us very unreliable data. The term "corona case" is very, very, ambiguous and cannot the understood as such without a detailed explanation on how the counting was done. Thanks for sharing. I found the peek in all-case mortality also very interesting, because that way counting is much more unambiguous: dead is dead. They showed a clear diversion from…

> because that way counting is much more unambiguous: dead is dead

Unrealistically low death stats coming from Turkey compared to cases easily refute that argument.

Dead is dead, unless the state finds a way to claim that it was not a COVID19 dead.

Re: In 4 US state prisons, 3,300 inmates test positive, 96% without symptoms

#94

Post by macromagnon »

_2d30 wrote: post #42

I'd guess smoking rates are very high in prisons. It seems smokers (even former) are much better off than non-smokers.

Smoking weakens your heart and lungs (and probably doesn't help high blood pressure) so what makes you say that?

Re: In 4 US state prisons, 3,300 inmates test positive, 96% without symptoms

#95

Post by tempestn »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #84

Lets not get too excited about this. Whatever the numbers, that's interesting and worth recording for planning. But whatever they are, they result in "way too many deaths". This is still a very dangerous and rapidly-spreading virus.

Yeah, one leap I often see made is, say a study shows "only" a 0.5% case fatality rate, about 5x as bad as an average flu. It's natural from there to then think letting it run unchecked would only be about 5x as bad as a flu. Very bad, certainly, but perhaps manageable. But that ignores the fact that there is a flu vaccine, and even without one the natural rate of spread of the flu is lower than this virus. So without measures, many more people would be infected and so it would be much worse than 5x an average flu, even if the CFR is indeed 0.5% (for example).

Of course, that doesn't mean these numbers aren't useful for planning and determining what degree of intervention is warranted, as you say.

Edit: could one of those down-voting explain? If I'm making a mistake here I'd like to understand it.

Re: In 4 US state prisons, 3,300 inmates test positive, 96% without symptoms

#96

Post by [deleted] »

tyingq wrote: post #14
alexbanks wrote: post #2

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?

There's also the nuance of US state prison care quality. "Without symptoms" could just mean "not obviously gasping for air" .

[deleted]

Re: In 4 US state prisons, 3,300 inmates test positive, 96% without symptoms

#97

Post by microcolonel »

colmvp wrote: post #55

As a Canadian, I'm shaking my head at our officials who said "we do know that asymptomatic people are not the key driver of epidemics" as a response to concerns back in January of the potential for the virus to grow in our country via incoming travelers who came from hot spots and were not screened or forced to isolate if they expressed no symptoms. Now our long term care facilities are being overrun with cases poten…

Ultimately this has exposed that WHO is a malicious institution which actively undermines the public health for Tedros Adhanom's personal relationship to the cause of the CCP and of fascism more generally.

Each of our government's dangerously false statements has come from the WHO, and trusting them has been the primary mistake made in assessing this threat.

"no evidence of Human-to-human spread" when they had evidence, "no evidence of asymptomatic spread" when we all had evidence, "no evidence of aerosol spread" when there was evidence in public view: The WHO been there at every step to cast doubt on the seriousness of this threat, and to discourage us from considering and addressing the avenues of spread.

Re: In 4 US state prisons, 3,300 inmates test positive, 96% without symptoms

#99

Post by bobongo »

HN seems to have forgotten what happened in Wuhan, Bergamo, and New York in its newfound polemic of "the death rate is just like that of the flu" in the comments of the recent headlines.

Either this is actually HN's denial of what's going on, or we are witnessing paid shills overwhelming actual users in the number of comments and votes.

Re: In 4 US state prisons, 3,300 inmates test positive, 96% without symptoms

#100

Post by Pfhreak »

tyingq wrote: post #14
alexbanks wrote: post #2

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?

There's also the nuance of US state prison care quality. "Without symptoms" could just mean "not obviously gasping for air" .

This is absolutely my reading. That someone is not really observing or listening to prisoner symptoms with much care either because of distrust between the prisoner and the medical technicians or because prisoners receive such poor care.
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