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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

#121

Post by vanniv »

jbritton wrote: post #87
ivanhoe wrote: post #52

I've read that asymptomatic carriers are though to be less infectious than those with symptoms because of the lower concentration of virus in the saliva. Also, many virologists mentioned in recent texts that the initial concentration of the virus you receive can affect how sick you'll get - the more viruses you're exposed to, the faster they can invade the body and the more severe it will get. Can those two facts be…

I have been wondering about the effect of the degree of initial infection. I kind of assume the virus grows exponentially inside the body and would dwarf the initial constant. If a low initial dose affects the severity of the disease, I think that would be incredibly useful to know. I also wish there was info on percentage of infection via fomites vs inhalation.

Early on, there was some discussion of the possibility that folks whose initial exposure is via the eyes would have a more mild illness than if the exposure was via nostrils or inhalation, because the immune system would have time to begin work while the virus was multiplying more slowly in tissue less suited to it.

I haven't heard anything in weeks studying anything like this, though, so I don't know where we ended up, if, indeed anybody knows anything at all.

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

#122

Post by samatman »

frereubu wrote: post #108
hkeide wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the opposite of everything I've read

I think they're referring to this: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/22/french-study-s... The idea is that nicotine may lower your chances of infection, but once established I imagine that smoking will definitely reduce your chances of survival.

Well, it lowers your chance of being listed as an infected person.

Presuming this is true (lots of evidence but still much too early to be sure), there's two possibilities: nicotine makes a person less likely to be infected, or nicotine makes it less likely that the infected will develop any symptoms. No symptoms, no test, that's been the rule until quite recently.

If it's the latter, it could explain what's going on here. I doubt that's the explanation, but it's possible.

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

#123

Post by frereubu »

ivanhoe wrote: post #52

I've read that asymptomatic carriers are though to be less infectious than those with symptoms because of the lower concentration of virus in the saliva. Also, many virologists mentioned in recent texts that the initial concentration of the virus you receive can affect how sick you'll get - the more viruses you're exposed to, the faster they can invade the body and the more severe it will get. Can those two facts be…

Where did you read that? Superficially that might make sense - less virus particles == less obvious symptoms - but there are a wide variety of virus responses that show virulence and infectiousness aren't necessarily correlated.

If anyone wants to read more about this I can't recommend highly enough the book Spillover by David Quammen, which was published in 2012, and covers zoonotic (animal-to-human transmission) viruses, including SARS. Reading the section on SARS made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. It's uncannily similar to what's happening with Covid-19, and explains a lot of the background involved in these kinds of viruses.

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

#124

Post by nodamage »

marcell wrote: post #41
DanBC wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What numbers are you using for sensitivity and specificity?

It depends on the study, I've been using their reported confidence intervals. The two California studies (Santa Clara and Los Angeles) used the same kit, which has 2 false positives of 371 tests, and 10-20% false negative rate.

It's worth noting that is the manufacturer claim but has not held up to independent validation.

Specifically, the Premier Biotech/Hangzhou Biotest Biotech test was validated by a Chinese provincial CDC and found 4 false positives out of 150. [1]

It was also validated by the COVID-19 Testing project and found 3 false positives out of 108. [2]

The Biomedomics test used in the Miami Dade study was also validated by the COVID-19 Testing Project and found 14 false positives out of 107. [2]

Hence I would recommend taking the results of the California and Florida studies with a huge grain of salt as the prevalence rates they found were within the false positive rates of the tests used.

[1] https://imgcdn.mckesson.com/CumulusWeb/Click_and_learn/COVID...

[2] https://covidtestingproject.org/

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

#125

Post by alkonaut »

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?

> at what point

When at least one large studied group has an outcome (symptomatic recovered, asymptomatic recovered, or dead). So for this group I guess a few more weeks.

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

#126

Post by wk_end »

jacobolus wrote: post #60
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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? Presumably in two weeks, when we know whether more of these thousands of people go on to develop symptoms or not. Is anybody following up on stories like this? Do we have any from two weeks ago?

> Is anybody following up on stories like this? The best follow-up we have is from the cruise ship, where at the time of testing more than half of those who tested positive were asymptomatic, but ultimately something like 80% of the confirmed infected ended up with symptoms.

Just curious - do you have any sources for this? I've heard it a few times and just looked it up - I found a paper [1] from March 12 that used "statistical modelling" to predict ~20% asymptomatic after a delay, but several articles 1-2 weeks after 12th indicating that they were still seeing ~50% (e.g. [2]). I think all the articles with that 50% number were based on the same test, but couldn't find anything suggesting that there were follow-ups to confirm the 20% prediction.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7078829/

[2] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6912e3.htm

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

#127

Post by gaius_baltar »

bobongo wrote: post #93
cies wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

It's just a matter of demanding tests to declare as a COVID death and do not providing enough tests.

Brazil, for example, has an artificially low count of cases due to the lack of tests and a similarly low number of deaths. However, cases of death by "pneumonia", generic types of SARS and "unexplained respiratory diseases" skyrocketed: https://oglobo.globo.com/sociedade/coronavirus/alem-da-covid...

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

#128

Post by DoreenMichele »

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…

It's a prison population. Prisons and nursing homes are both seeing shockingly high infection rates because of the nature of what they do, which involves confining groups of people in close quarters.

People in nursing homes are elderly. Lots are dying.

People in prison aren't uniformly elderly. You are bound to see more variation in symptoms.

(Plus, as stated elsewhere, the opinions and experiences of known criminals tend to get discounted, so the report of lack of symptoms may be more about that than about the general resilience of the population. Also also: It's well established that if you ignore, dismiss and neglect someone enough, they stop complaining because they know it doesn't do any good. Aka learned helplessness.)

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

#129

Post by snovv_crash »

bobongo wrote: post #93
cies wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Or the other way around, someone who dies in a car crash but tests positive could count as a COVID death.

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

#130

Post by [deleted] »

ilamont wrote: post #109

96% are without symptoms yet . There was a nursing home in Massachusetts which had 51 out of 98 residents testing positive but asymptomatic in early April. While this sounded encouraging in the sense no one was critically ill because of coronavirus, a few weeks later 19 had died and about 30 more had tested positive. Let’s wait a month until there is a clearer picture about the impact of the virus on a particular pop…

[deleted]
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