311–320 of 649 posts
That’s also suggesting that the fatality rate is nowhere near what we have been led to believe.
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…
The virus affects young and healthy folks without co-morbidities dramatically less than it does old folks at a nursing home. Based on New York City data, people without co-morbidities account for something like 6% of hospitalizations [1]. Old folks on a cruise ship full of old people, about 20% showed no symptoms. Is it a big stretch to think that scales to prisoners as shown? They're pretty young (only 2.8% of priso…
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A very important thing is that % is concentrated among old and people with preexisting health conditions. Not every death is the same - a 80 year old with weak immune system could have lived 5 years longer without corona, but a healthy 20 year-old dying from cytokine storm caused by influenza has lost potentially 60 years of healthy life - the loss is much worse.
How does that compare, with other high IFR diseases, didn't they also have deaths skewed towards older people?
The elderly and immunocompromised obviously die more to almost every illness. But the effect is really pronounced with covid. And most other viral infections tend to kill children at higher rates too, and covid very notably does not. It's definitely an interesting aspect of the disease, though it's produce a kind of horrifying calculus among a lot of the right wing in the US.
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The virus affects young and healthy folks without co-morbidities dramatically less than it does old folks at a nursing home. Based on New York City data, people without co-morbidities account for something like 6% of hospitalizations [1]. Old folks on a cruise ship full of old people, about 20% showed no symptoms. Is it a big stretch to think that scales to prisoners as shown? They're pretty young (only 2.8% of priso…
Wouldn’t prisons disproportionately have poorer health than average for several reasons?
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I can’t believe this is not a new account. Blanket propagandistic statements are not the conversation we have in Hacker News comments.
> Blanket propagandistic statements Blanket implies "all". Are the OP's following statements incorrect?: "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 Taiwan warned the WHO with respect to human-to-human transmission. Is this in dispute? https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld…
""News sources indicate at least seven atypical pneumonia cases were reported in Wuhan, China". It also said while China's health authorities replied to the media that the cases were believed not to be SARS, "they have been isolated for treatment"."
Furthermore, from the picture: "I would gladly appreciate if you have relevant information to share with us."
So Taiwanese authorities read publicly available news sources about seven atypical pneumonia cases in Wuhan, and because the media reports said the cases were being isolated for treatment, they asked the WHO if they had any additional information.
Unless I'm reading it wrong, this does not mean that Taiwan had any additional knowledge other than what they had read from publicly available information.
One of the super-interesting things here, is that apparently everyone was in the specific window where they test positive for the virus. This implies the population was recently infected, had not been previously infected, and it spread almost completely within a tight window. This implies a shocking high R(effective) for that population. In 2 weeks we'll have super interesting data one way of the other on the CFR.
Covid-19 fatalities takes up to 2 months after infection, symptoms have a median of just over 5 days from first exposure.
The most common fatal case seems to be roughly: 1 week without symptoms, 1 week of mild symptoms, 1 week of severe symptoms, death. That's 3 weeks.
In rare (1/10000) cases, incubation time can reach 14 days, that's where the 14 days quarantine recommendation comes from. But the median is closer to 5 days.
Time to death can be much longer, the virus can cause all sorts of damage to the body, including secondary infections. And if the patient is strong enough to resist the primary infection but not enough to recover, it can take a long time.
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It's the "for starters" that concerns me. A lot of us were always saying that official case counts are much too low, and antibody surveys were supposed to be the definitive proof that we were responsibly waiting for. Now they're starting to come out, and still nobody believes it. I worry it's a moving goalpost, and no evidence will ever be enough to make people start reconsidering their beliefs.
I totally agree that the confirmed case counts are way too low, because even most people who were symptomatic weren't able to get tested (e.g. me), let alone random people who were asymptomatic. But the 21% study is seriously flawed because it didn't do a random sampling of the population. We need that at a minimum to know with any certainty what the actual exposure rate is. The figures that are coming back from stud…
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Also there have been reports of Ground Glass Opacities[1] in the lungs of people with infections previously thought of as asymptomatic. [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground-glass_opacity
Sure, but that doesn't mean they... won't go away. In fact, I'm pretty confident all signs point to the fact they will go away. In fact you get ground glass opacities with H1N1 inflenza [1]. I guess the question is "functional asymptomaticity" vs "actual asymptomaticity". Like, if it's not bad enough for people to even notice does it really matter? [1] https://pubs.rsna.org/doi/full/10.1148/radiol.10092240
powerful argument there, not.
With SARS1 there was continuing damage post 6 months.
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> 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 te…
Not sure I follow. I confess I'm biased in thinking we could have locked down nursing homes and shaved a large chunk of deaths. Catch is, we should have done that in January.
How would you do that without locking down the rest of the population? You're going to isolate all nursing home workers?
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It's the "for starters" that concerns me. A lot of us were always saying that official case counts are much too low, and antibody surveys were supposed to be the definitive proof that we were responsibly waiting for. Now they're starting to come out, and still nobody believes it. I worry it's a moving goalpost, and no evidence will ever be enough to make people start reconsidering their beliefs.
> antibody surveys were supposed to be the definitive proof that we were responsibly waiting for. Simple question: Why? For most coronaviruses, antibodies reflect only a temporary immunity, that is usual gone in 6-24 months, due to the nature of these viruses. All an antibody survey shows is that antibodies can be created, not that they are effective long term. Showing a longer term immunity takes statistical analysi…
A good place to keep an eye on for the short term would be Sweden. Despite the lack of lockdown their disease penetrance is still on par with the UK.