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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

#581

Post by CydeWeys »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #360
CydeWeys wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's almost like you need to do your random sample based on a list of all residents, and not just go out and try to find people at various locations.

You say "almost like", but scientific studies rarely sample the population this way because researchers generally don't have access to a list of all residents.

The state is running these studies. I guarantee you New York State has many good lists of people living in the state. Start with the jury duty list, for example. It pulls data from the DMV, voter registration files, state tax filers, non-driver's IDs such as NYC ID, and more. That covers all the adults. You can get a good list of adults residing in the state to pull your random sample from, and to include the children go get data from the school system and/or just test whatever children live with any given adult that you pick randomly.

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

#582

Post by CydeWeys »

nradov wrote: post #425
CydeWeys wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's almost like you need to do your random sample based on a list of all residents, and not just go out and try to find people at various locations.

There is no such list. No US state has a master list of all residents. The DMV has a fairly high percentage but even that tends to miss children, older people, undocumented immigrants, etc.

I would be willing to bet that if you combine all the different lists that New York State and its various agencies have (DMV, DOE, Department of Taxation and Finance, NYC ID, jury duty, voter registration, social services, etc.), that you would easily get >99% coverage of all people who've resided here for at least one year.

This would be a much better list to sample randomly from than "go to a grocery store and test everyone who walks in".

I should point out on /r/nyc, some local redditors saw the testing going on all week in the same location and posted about it, informing others. I suspect this led people who wanted a free test to actively seek them out, especially because it's so hard to get tested otherwise. I'm pretty sure I had it over a month ago and I still haven't gotten tested, so if I'd seen those posts in time I'd have headed over there to get tested myself. Point is, the sample is even further biased because word spread around and some number of people getting tested there were actively seeking it out for reasons.

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

#583

Post by retrac »

throwaway_pdp09 wrote: post #579
bshanks wrote: post #532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since the hospitalization and mortality rates vary so much with age, it would be surprising if the rate of asymptomatic cases didn't. Since prisons skew young we would expect a much higher proportion of asymptomatics to be found there than in the general population.

If you are going to say they skew young (or make any claim), please provide some figures. I did a search, from https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_age.j... 65 Over 65 4,746 2.8% Whether this backs you up or not depends on what 'young' is.

That's federal prison data. People who go to federal prison aren't necessarily the same cross-section of the population who go to state prison.

Anyway, those numbers are certainly much younger than the median age in the USA nationally, which is 39 years with over 65s being 15% of the population.

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

#584

Post by klmadfejno »

throwaway_pdp09 wrote: post #579
bshanks wrote: post #532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since the hospitalization and mortality rates vary so much with age, it would be surprising if the rate of asymptomatic cases didn't. Since prisons skew young we would expect a much higher proportion of asymptomatics to be found there than in the general population.

If you are going to say they skew young (or make any claim), please provide some figures. I did a search, from https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_age.j... 65 Over 65 4,746 2.8% Whether this backs you up or not depends on what 'young' is.

Skew isn't the right word. But relative to average this is definitely younger.

https://www.indexmundi.com/united_states/age_structure.html

Local demographics will vary wildly but it looks like the baseline would be 16% 65 and older, 13% in the range of 55-64. Since we're talking about prisons we should probably ignore the population under 18, so the normalized expected population over 65 is closer to 20%.

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

#585

Post by CydeWeys »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #402
joshuamorton wrote: post #385

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.

> It will also show an undercount of at least an order of magnitude.

It seems pretty likely that the data will come out showing at least 10%, so it's literally impossible for it to undercount by an order of magnitude.

How do you think a random sample of inhabitants would be off by a whole order of magnitude, anyway? Can you explain the mechanism whereby that might happen? The only thing that comes to mind would be using a worthless test with a 90+% false negative rate.

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

#586

Post by [deleted] »

greedo wrote: post #473
rubber_duck wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can self isolate without quarantine measures in effect so your point isn't that strong to me and you are ignoring that one of the biggest destabilising forces in history is economic downturn. US-China relations have been bad for a while now and both sides are throwing blame at each other as a populist policy (China has a US origin story allegedly). If this pushes the economy in to a global depression who knows wh…

Self-isolating vulnerable populations is almost impossible. You're talking over 100M in the US. And not doing anything (pretend it's just the flu) will result in 50M dead world wide. Everyone worried about a new depression should realize one is going to happen no matter what we do now. The only thing we can do is act in a humane fashion.

[deleted]

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

#587

Post by greedo »

jfnixon wrote: post #516
greedo wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Self-isolating vulnerable populations is almost impossible. You're talking over 100M in the US. And not doing anything (pretend it's just the flu) will result in 50M dead world wide. Everyone worried about a new depression should realize one is going to happen no matter what we do now. The only thing we can do is act in a humane fashion.

Your number is highly suspect. About 16% of the US is 65+, or roughly 50M. Where do you get your 50M worldwide figure? When a new flu appears, Neil Ferguson claims his 3K lies of undocumented C code forecast 200M will die. These numbers are all speculation and worse predictors than throwing darts at a board behind your back.

One third of the US population is considered at risk due to comorbidities. With over 328M people in the US, that's roughly 100M.

If you look worldwide, there are 7.8B people. If herd immunity takes 60% of the population becoming infected, that's 4.6B infections. With an IFR of 1%, that's 46.8M deaths. 460M hospitalizations (where possible).

Even say the IFR is overstated as some like. Say it's a magnitude less, comparable to the flu at .1% Now you are down to 4.7M deaths, but still the 460M hospitalizations. Still one of the most serious crises in the last 100 years.

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

#588

Post by pedrosorio »

danielfoster wrote: post #37
garmaine wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have huge false positive rates though.

And false negatives.

If the rate of false positives and false negatives is the same but the true prevalence is << 0.5, then you will overestimate the number of positives.

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

#589

Post by acconrad »

freeflight wrote: post #562

One of the more interesting differences between US prison populations and others is that smoking tobacco is way more prevalent: > Estimated smoking prevalence among inmates was approximately 50% in 2003–2004, compared to 21% among noninstitutionalized adults. [0] Which might play a major role in the spread and the actual severity of COVID-19 as French researchers are speculating that nicotine could be responsible for…

I could see this making sense for tobacco users that don't smoke (e.g. chewing tobacco) but for people that smoke...I mean this is a respiratory illness. If you have compromised lungs this seems like it would be a nightmare for smokers. Are you concerned at all with the veracity of these claims?

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

#590

Post by nradov »

CydeWeys wrote: post #582
nradov wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no such list. No US state has a master list of all residents. The DMV has a fairly high percentage but even that tends to miss children, older people, undocumented immigrants, etc.

I would be willing to bet that if you combine all the different lists that New York State and its various agencies have (DMV, DOE, Department of Taxation and Finance, NYC ID, jury duty, voter registration, social services, etc.), that you would easily get >99% coverage of all people who've resided here for at least one year. This would be a much better list to sample randomly from than "go to a grocery store and test…

Now you're talking about a huge legal issue just to get access to the data, followed by a huge record linkage issue to remove duplicates. So with the time pressure involved, your proposal is so completely impractical as to be ridiculous.
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