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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

#521
post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In rare (1/10000) cases, incubation time can reach 14 days What's the cite for that number? I'd be very suspicious of anything claiming a 5-significant-figure result in a disease that has only (heh) 3M known cases. In fact there's significant supposition that the incubation time and asymptomatic contagious state can last much longer than originally guessed. This would go a long way to explaining the difficulty of d…

South Korea had a very rapid decline post peak. 1062 cases on 2/29 to 114 cases on 3/11. With an average of just under 10 cases per day for the last week. Also, the number I have seen was ~1% of cases where asymptotic for 14 days. https://hub.jhu.edu/2020/03/09/coronavirus-incubation-period...

Do note that rapid decline in the day-to-day increase of case numbers is not necessarily indicative of rapid decline in transmission rate. Transmission rate could have declined gradually over the course of a week or more, and the rapid decline in day-to-day increase of case numbers could have just been detection catching up with existing infections.

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

#522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We know from the cruise ship data like the Diamond Princess that most people had no symptoms initially, but overtime most people became symptomatic [1]. Your wording is too strong. Data is 50% asymptomatic at time of testing, paper models that that number dropped to 20%. > from paper on 19 February and 50.5% (320/634) on 20 February (Table). Soon after identification of the first infections, both symptomatic and as…

If you read in the discussion they reference other data sets to show that more asymptomatic become symptomatic. It is also what the Icelanders found with their data too where most people started out asymptomatic, but many later developed symptoms.

In a region in Italy they tested [1] people twice, 2 weeks apart, and found that 43% were completely asymptomatic over the course of the infection.

[1] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.17.20053157v...

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

#523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, the type of information you're trying to gather is rather unique. Usually we just wait for a virus to run course then test lots of people to see the resulting case counts. But we can't do that here. Normally you just use a control and test group, but that doesn't work for figuring out underlying infection rates. There are some tests trying to sample everyone in a geographic area (SF Mission census block) but th…

I guarantee you that when the data comes out: * It will also show an undercount of at least an order of magnitude. * Commenters will still pop up to explain why the results can't be trusted and which further studies are absolutely required before we believe them.

Does anyone not think case count is an order of magnitude less than infected count?

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

#524

To add another data point, Singapore has been testing foreign workers living in dormitories extensively, uncovering about 10,000 cases (about 80% of the country's total cases). These are relatively fit individuals between the ages of 20 and 40. However, the number of people in the ICU has remained remarkably consistent at about ~20 people in the past 10 days (Fingers crossed it remains that way). https://www.moh.gov.…

Many migrant workers in Singapore are the only breadwinners for their families back home in Bangladesh/India/Myanmar. One of the reasons the Singapore government has done extensive testing way beyond global standards is that many of these foreign workers are financially disincentivized to seek medical help the moment the first symptoms appear. The fact that Singapore's leader has publicly promised stable incomes for…

It would be extremely alarming if there were large numbers of deaths or hospital admissions occurring among the Singapore workers who are testing positive. Given that there are virtually none, the lack of testing in other ASEAN countries is hardly extremely alarming. A lack of data is less concerning if you wouldn't do anything differently if you had the data.

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

#525
post #17

It doesn't appear to mention what type of test was done. Were they checking for current active infection, or for antibodies which would indicate if the person has ever been infected? (if the latter, they may have had symptoms back then)

I am not willing to even consider these results until more details about testing are revealed. There has already been so much misinformation about testing and results that I am incredibly skeptical of any results now.

Same here. Is there any chance the viral load test is also testing positive for other coronaviruses that are not SARS-CoV-2? Because I can't find any information addressing that.

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

#526
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.

>> .. that apparently everyone was in the specific window where they test positive for the virus.

The data comes from 4 prisons. It is theoretically possible that all 4 of them happened to be in the same window after an initial infection, but it doesn't seem very likely. I guess the only way to be sure is to do follow up tests every week or so, hopefully that will happen.

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

#527
post #403
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…

Here is for Europe if you are interested. There are charts for excess morality by country, by age, and by year. https://www.euromomo.eu/ There is a very noticeable spike in the worst hit countries: Italy, Spain, France, Belgium, Netherlands and the UK. The cumulative excess deaths for all Europe in the last two months matches the COVID-19 reported deaths (around 100000).

It's nice to have another source on this. I saw a similar comparison from an Italian site:

https://www.corriere.it/politica/20_marzo_26/the-real-death-...

New York has been criticized for retroactively adding older cases. The Johns Hopkins data just tacks it on to the end of their time series, creating a weird spike and screwing up what the data represents:

https://battlepenguin.com/tech/fighting-with-the-data/

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

#528
post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you see the NYC antibody sample that showed that approximately 21 percent of citizens had antibodies? It seems like a nursing home is a pretty bad representation of a population.

I am not sure that these antibody tests mean what people generally think they mean. For example, there seem to be multiple events where people get sick even after it has been established that they have antibodies. Furthermore, people in environments with a lot of virus (i.e., cruise ships, hospitals, or just northern italian towns where the virus has run amok, tend to get sick and die at much higher rate than those a…

>For example, there seem to be multiple events where people get sick even after it has been established that they have antibodies.

Do you have a source for that?

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

#529
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…

That chart is funny. The title is “unprecedented spike”, but it just shows that such outliers have occurred regularly.

Not at this time of the year if I am reading the chart right.

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

#530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Over 40% of Americans have comorbidities (hypertension and obesity being most common) so that stat is not particularly useful.

To add to your point, here is a paper with data on this:

https://www.kff.org/global-health-policy/issue-brief/how-man...

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