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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

#341

Post by usrusr »

RangerScience wrote: post #212
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…

...Let's also ask if the tests have a high false positive rate?

Even more relevant to this observation is that false positives aren't properly random: if the test happens to be falsely positive for some other rare virus it's very much possible that the entire prison was hit by that virus, creating a cluster of connected false positives.

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

#342

Post by Symmetry »

jwlake wrote: post #137

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.

SARS, MERS, and now SARS-2 are all known for super-spreader events where occasionally one person just infects a ton of other people. And we know from testing that the amount of live virus in a person's phlegm can vary by many orders of magnitude so I guess that isn't surprising. There are a lot of people who infect just one other person but the overall R(effective) is substantially driven by the long tail.

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

#343

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

fzeroracer wrote: post #330
Zach_the_Lizard wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Is it your thesis that the economy must never reopen until we know the long-term ramifications of the virus?

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

#344

Post by wk_end »

ziga wrote: post #257
wk_end wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 suggestin…

In this study they tracked 104 patients from the cruise ship, from Feb 11 to Feb 25. Started with 43 asymptomatic (41%), went down to 33 asymptomatic (32%). https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.18.20038125v...

Feb 25th seems to predate the reports of the more comprehensive testing that found the near 50% asymptomatic rate.

In particular, that CDC report I linked above citing 46.5% is from late March (early release on March 23, published on March 27th).

That report cites a website by the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare [1], which itself confirms that 46.5% (331/712) is up-to-date as of March 26th.

I'm not very knowledgeable about stats, to be perfect honest, but I think your paper must've turned out to be a red herring. Maybe they got unlucky with their sample?

[1] https://www.mhlw.go.jp/stf/seisakunitsuite/bunya/newpage_000...

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

#345

Post by matwood »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #259
CydeWeys wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about an actually randomly sampled test, for starters?

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 don't think anyone is moving goalposts. Most of the antibody studies that have come out have had serious flaws either with the tests themselves or the sampling. The recent NY one was ok, but still had sampling issues because it only sampled people who were out and about during a lockdown. I would expect those people to have a higher prevalence of exposure.

With that said, the extrapolated numbers for NY do fall in line with the original IFR of .5-1% The downside is that if that is the IFR then the US is looking at 1.6-3.3M deaths assuming hospital systems can keep up as the infection spreads.

Edit. It's also important to talk about infection counts (what antibody tests are looking for) and case counts (people who show symptoms and end up seeking medical care). In the past when people were saying it's just the flu they were comparing COVID-19 IFR to the flus CFR.

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

#346

Post by rubber_duck »

newacct583 wrote: post #309
rubber_duck wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Not every death is the same OK, so how many "influenza death equivalents" are we looking at? What's your metric for how bad this is? I mean, I think that's a little ghoulish, obviously, but if people really want to make this argument I'd really like to see the kinds of well-founded numbers that the experts are producing. Medical ethics is hardly a new field, after all. You'd think someone would have pulled some ana…

I think there are already such calculations for approving drugs on public health programs - cost of treatment vs years of quality life provided.

So you would need to estimate the number of years lost vs the economic damage. This is impossible to get right on both sides but at least it gives you a framework.

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

#347

Post by SlowRobotAhead »

hazeii wrote: post #64
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…

There's asymptomatic and presymptomatic (a very rapid spread could give lots of positive results before symptoms appear).

So, in two weeks, if these prisons are still 96% asymptomatic - then what?

I hope that’s the case, everyone should. I have yet to see a single indication this is worse than than anyone’s projections. I think that’s a dangerous scenario for the next time a virus comes along.

If there is any perceptionat all of overreacting, it’ll be a cry-wolf scenario with a lot of people.

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

#348

Post by matwood »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #340
matwood wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. It’s a random sampling of people who are out during lockdown. It can’t being extrapolated to the whole population when large parts are not leaving their homes.

And if you go around to people's homes, you'll oversample people who aren't out during the lockdown. There's no silver bullet here.

You do both. This is why study design matters. And it's one of the reasons all of the early antibody studies have issues (the other being test accuracy).

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

#349

Post by Gibbon1 »

jwlake wrote: post #137

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.

I repeatedly point this out. There was the church choir practice where 45 out of 60 people were infected within what two hours? There is also a Korean call center where about 2/3 of the people in an open office were infected.

I've repeatedly linked to CDC study that estimates r0 in Wuhan before lockdown at between 3.8 and 8.7. Median 5.8.

Take away: Completely avoid being indoors with large groups of people.

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

#350

Post by fzeroracer »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #343
fzeroracer wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Is it your thesis that the economy must never reopen until we know the long-term ramifications of the virus?

Generally speaking? it's probably a good idea to delay opening things back up until we know the full extent of the virus, yes. If the antibodies only confer short-term protection and people could get reinfected again (as some indications have shown), it MIGHT be a bad idea to reopen the economy and pave the way for a second wave of the virus, you know? Just throwing that out there.

If you think things are bad now, do you honestly think things would get better if we had to go through this again because we decided to stop early? Though given you seem to be peddling the idea that this is all a conspiracy by activists to keep us at home forever, I'm willing to bet you're not going to engage this point with any sort of good faith.

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