Live data from Hacker News

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

reuters.com

321–330 of 649 posts

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

#321

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?

When we know the full extent of the virus? It's an easy question to ask, but an incredibly hard one to answer.

For example, they've been finding that the virus can trigger strokes in otherwise healthy individuals. That's individuals that either exhibit no symptoms or minor symptoms. So while they may otherwise be asymptomatic, we can't know unless we do a full extensive test to see if they're also suffering from unseen clotting issues.

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

#322

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…

? You're comparing a prison to a nursing home Another data point, ~12k healthy foreign workers in Singapore have tested positive. The city-state has only 12 deaths total (all elderly, not the foreign workers). In Singapore the foreign workers may have already been asymptomatic for weeks. Based on NYC data, LA city data, Stanford's Santa Clara data, Singapore, Danish blood donor data, a picture is emerging that the vi…

[deleted]

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

#323

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?

The asymptomatic rate being that high and that many people being infected implies three things. 1) that the asymptomatic rate for this Coronavirus is much higher than other Coronaviruses. 2) but at the same time, it's more deadly than most Coronaviruses. 3) and it's also the R0 is much higher than other Coronaviruses. Isn't it more likely there's a testing issue? This seems a lot like a person that runs a SQL query t…

> instead of first assuming that their query is wrong, they instead assume everyone at the business is wrong

All those 3 numbers you cite are taken from the same small set of models where the rate of asymptomatic cases is an input. So, no, that's not right.

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

#324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> I'm pretty confident powerful argument there, not. With SARS1 there was continuing damage post 6 months.

SARS-COV-1 has a two orders of magnitude higher fatality rate, so one would imagine the damage would be substantially worse. Is it really a stretch to believe that level and quantity of damage correlate both to recovery time and to mortality rates? Further, were there asymptomatic SARS-COV-1 cases?

SARS-COV-1 had an IFR (not CFR) of 14-15%. Broken out, it's less than 1% for people younger than 25, 6% for those aged 25 to 44, 15% for those aged 45 to 64, and more than 50% for people 65 or older, officials said. [1]

On the other hand SARS-COV-2 has an IFR of somewhere in the lower quartile of the range 0.1% to 1%, trending to around 0.3%.

Not to mention, I argued that lung function would recover, to which you said "strong argument, not [the much worse disease saw lung function recover in 6 months]" which implies you were actually supporting my argument not refuting it.

The coronaviridae family is huge, and fatality varies from ~0% in the 15% of common colds they cause to 0.1-1% for COVID to 15% for SARS-COV-1 to 50% for MERS. I can't stress this enough. SARS-COV-1 and MERS are not SARS-COV-2, they are much worse diseases.

[1] https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2003/05/estimate...

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

#325
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…

Wild speculation is not the solution to lack of information. We all want to know how reliable these tests are. I don't understand why we can't find this information. But that is not an excuse to make nonsense assumptions and craft imaginary narratives.

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

#326
post #98

This is actually not such a bad thing. It means that the true case rate is much much higher, and thus the true fatality rate is much much lower.

A disease where only symptomatic people tend to be infectious would be far easier to manage and cause lower total damage even if it were deadlier.

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

#327

Every article I see about people testing asymptomatic is followed by comments insisting they were asymptomatic when tested , with no idea of whether they stayed asymptomatic or whether virtually all of them had symptoms a few days later, thus basically invalid. But this doesn't seem like a hard problem to solve, folks . Is nobody bothering to follow up with the asymptomatic people a week later? Just take their mobile…

It is being done though, virtually everywhere. Huge amount of testing worldwide is confirming case recovery. You are conflating armchair epidemiologists on HN with the reality on the ground. What people say here doesn't reflect what is being done.

Where is the follow up data? Is there a link or reference? Or do you have inside information?

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

#328
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...

you have the prevalence for NY state but the row is called NY city. The NYC prevalence was 21.2

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

#329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn’t prisons disproportionately have poorer health than average for several reasons?

Is there data on that? Or is it an assumption?

There's plenty of data indicating that's the case, for instance [1]. That said, the population is also much younger and age has a much bigger impact than comorbidities.

[1] https://issues.org/correctional-health-is-community-health/

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

#330
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, it isn't proof. It is evidence, though. And in two weeks, we will have a lot more evidence. 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 peo…

> 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. I think at this point we know enough to say: 1) For most of the population, the virus is not that serious 2) For a subset of the population the virus is seriously deadly. For example, ~20% of NY state coronavirus deaths were from nursing homes, ~37% are 80 or older. By con…

A question for you: If you're so sure about the severity of the virus, then I'd like you to tell me what you know about the long term rammifcations of the virus on people that exhibit symptoms.

If you can't, then perhaps it might be a good idea to reconsider advocating for reopening the economy. Because for all we know, this could end up being another Chickenpox situation leading to something similar to Shingles. We don't know enough about the virus to make reckless remarks such as yours.

Post reply on HN