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Initial Covid-19 infection rate may be 80 times greater than originally reported

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Re: Initial Covid-19 infection rate may be 80 times greater than originally reported

#101

Post by chimprich »

adamhearn wrote: post #25
crooked-v wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, that obviously depends on where 'around you' is. Compare to New York City, where there have been an estimated 17,000 deaths (and even that's probably undercounted, going by some studies of excess deaths compared to previous years), and at the peak there were hundreds of unclaimed bodies per week being buried in mass graves.

This is completely anecdotal, but my good friend’s brother is an ER doctor. He said the hospital required them to label the cause of death for all patients in the hospital as covid if there was as much as one symptom. I don’t want to downplay the sadness of the deaths, but I think it is a bit foolish for us to base our number of deaths of off untested patients...

> my good friend’s brother is an ER doctor

I've seen a number of rumours from brothers of friends or friends of brothers, but no actual doctors saying this.

Re: Initial Covid-19 infection rate may be 80 times greater than originally reported

#102

Post by rvp-x »

ManlyBread wrote: post #12

I became numb to news like this because it doesn't seem to have any reflection in the reality around me. The numbers are supposed to be huge yet hospitals are nearly empty and no one I asked knows anyone who was infected. The 80x number looks like science fiction to me.

I know a lot of people who had COVID-19. I suspect I know mostly people who are healthier and young, so they don't get seriously ill.

Re: Initial Covid-19 infection rate may be 80 times greater than originally reported

#103

Post by chimprich »

AmericanChopper wrote: post #63
scarmig wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't explain it, though: the number of NYC deaths so far is 0.2% of its population. Assuming 100% of NYC is infected, that's a floor of 0.2% IFR. No amount of under testing can explain that. Which isn't to say that Singapore's death rate is an undercount, but that higher testing rates can't explain it.

Singapore’s actual death rate is also a much more reliable number than New York’s. The NY criteria for recording a Covid death has been pretty much anybody who could have potentially been infected at their time of death. There are some other confounding factors too, like SG infections being primarily among young people, and NY state discharging Covid patients to nursing homes. But none of that explains the monumental…

> The NY criteria for recording a Covid death has been pretty much anybody who could have potentially been infected at their time of death.

This is a common "fact" asserted in these discussions, and it's never backed up with any evidence.

Re: Initial Covid-19 infection rate may be 80 times greater than originally reported

#104

Post by barbasosi »

unlikelymordant wrote: post #36
adamhearn wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is completely anecdotal, but my good friend’s brother is an ER doctor. He said the hospital required them to label the cause of death for all patients in the hospital as covid if there was as much as one symptom. I don’t want to downplay the sadness of the deaths, but I think it is a bit foolish for us to base our number of deaths of off untested patients...

You can just look at the all cause excess deaths and see that the number of people that have died so far this year is much higher than previous years in New York. So whether you agree that person A died from covid or not, there were many more deaths due to something.

woah, i just looked up excess deaths in my city vs covid19 diagnosed deaths and it is freaking me out even more.

Re: Initial Covid-19 infection rate may be 80 times greater than originally reported

#105

Post by AmericanChopper »

chimprich wrote: post #103
AmericanChopper wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Singapore’s actual death rate is also a much more reliable number than New York’s. The NY criteria for recording a Covid death has been pretty much anybody who could have potentially been infected at their time of death. There are some other confounding factors too, like SG infections being primarily among young people, and NY state discharging Covid patients to nursing homes. But none of that explains the monumental…

> The NY criteria for recording a Covid death has been pretty much anybody who could have potentially been infected at their time of death. This is a common "fact" asserted in these discussions, and it's never backed up with any evidence.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/apr/15/new-york-cit...

> The soaring death toll has been fueled by the adding of 3,778 people who were not tested for Covid-19 but are presumed to have died from it.

Singapore’s organised approach is clearly going to produce much more reliable statistics than NYs presumption based approach.

Re: Initial Covid-19 infection rate may be 80 times greater than originally reported

#106

Post by saberdancer »

baxtr wrote: post #2

> “The findings suggest an alternative way of thinking about the COVID-19 pandemic. Our results suggest that the overwhelming effects of COVID-19 may have less to do with the virus’ lethality and more to do with how quickly it was able to spread through communities initially,” Silverman explained. “A lower fatality rate coupled with a higher prevalence of disease and rapid growth of regional epidemics provides an alt…

These type of studies focus on a couple of data points, ignore all others and then come up with conclusions such as these. It's impossible that the infection rate was this much less lethal as if that was the case Lombardy could not sustain the numbers it had, it would have been over 100% infected months ago.

In the article they mention that New York had 9% infection rate at the end of March. With the doubling rate they specified (3 days), New York would be fully infected by April 10th.

Re: Initial Covid-19 infection rate may be 80 times greater than originally reported

#107

Post by lol768 »

chosenbreed37 wrote: post #86
ageitgey wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People want this thing to be over, so there's a desire to find reasons to believe that we are further along than we thought. Combined with this being a novel disease that no one fully understands, there's a lot of room for those theories to develop. The current best science answer to how many people remain susceptible to infection is "nobody really knows but our best guess is not to assume the best case without bette…

> - The disease is astronomically worse for elderly people. One study said that for young person, getting COVID was as risky as going for a ~200 mile car drive but as a 90 year old it was as risky as flying a WWII bomber mission Interesting comparison. So here we're talking about the risk of dying from Covid-19. What about the risk of becoming seriously ill? What I'm curious is about is the percentage of people (youn…

There's also not enough discussion about what happens after recovery.

I was pretty ill in March (and, to a lesser extent, in April), which necessitated some time off work. Testing availability in my country was useless at the time, so I have no formal confirmation as to what it actually was. The govt also intervened, preventing my order of a private sector antibody test being fulfilled, so who knows.

The experience after recovery for me, though, was anything but straightforward and I really struggled with lasting fatigue, breathlessness and just general exhaustion. I was only able to work half-days for a decent chunk of time. I still don't feel 100% now. My GP thinks it was likely Covid-19 and offered a diagnosis of post-viral fatigue after some tests.

I'm 23. Statistically, this should have barely affected folks in my age group.

It's not an isolated case: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-north-east-orkney-she...

Re: Initial Covid-19 infection rate may be 80 times greater than originally reported

#108

Post by qeternity »

martin_bech wrote: post #16
qeternity wrote: post #10

History books will not be kind to our past and present handling of covid-19. Incurring incredible economic and social damage without fully understanding the threat. It’s been very clear for some time that covid is not nearly as lethal as once feared AND even more clear that we over quarantined. In the UK we have hospitals built specifically for covid that are completely unused. This isn’t flattening the curve, it’s c…

You are aware that despite the world very best efforts, almost 500.000 people have already died, and in many parts of the world, its actually not slowing down, but speeding up?

Do you realize how many of those people would have perished this year anyway? Do you realize how many hundreds of millions of people die every year and that covid barely registers as a blip? Do you realize the enormous human cost of quarantine has to be weighed against this?

Re: Initial Covid-19 infection rate may be 80 times greater than originally reported

#109

Post by ageitgey »

chosenbreed37 wrote: post #86
ageitgey wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People want this thing to be over, so there's a desire to find reasons to believe that we are further along than we thought. Combined with this being a novel disease that no one fully understands, there's a lot of room for those theories to develop. The current best science answer to how many people remain susceptible to infection is "nobody really knows but our best guess is not to assume the best case without bette…

> - The disease is astronomically worse for elderly people. One study said that for young person, getting COVID was as risky as going for a ~200 mile car drive but as a 90 year old it was as risky as flying a WWII bomber mission Interesting comparison. So here we're talking about the risk of dying from Covid-19. What about the risk of becoming seriously ill? What I'm curious is about is the percentage of people (youn…

> What I'm curious is about is the percentage of people (younger or otherwise) who either develop no symptoms or develop symptoms so mild as to not be attributed to the virus. Do such people exist?

Yes, absolutely. Many countries such as England do community infection studies. Essentially they pick a random sample of people and test them every week to see many people have the disease, even if they don't know it.

In the England study, they report that ~70% of positive tests involve people who didn't report any symptoms ever. That implies there are lots of people who had it who didn't know they had it.

> Out of those people that tested positive for COVID-19 over the study period, only 23% (95% confidence interval: 15% to 32%) reported experiencing one or more of the various symptoms at the time of their test. Out of those who reported testing positive, 33% (95% confidence interval: 23% to 44%) reported experiencing symptoms at any point in the period around testing positive. This was at the time of the visit, or at either the preceding or following visits.

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan...

Of course, the question is do these people get counted later in other ways - i.e. what percentage of them would show up in antibody surveys? That is currently a difficult question to answer with a high level of certainty for several reasons. Right now, we don't know for sure what level of infection causes you to develop detectable immunoglobulins, we don't know how long those stick around, and we don't know how much our immune system leans on T cells instead to fight COVID which don't show up in the existing antibody tests at all and are much more difficult to test for.

And it's also worth pointing out that it's not clear that asymptomatic infections are as infectious as symptomatic infections. So don't assume they are equal. A recent study showed that asymptomatic people could shed the virus for 3 weeks, but it's really hard to know if that's active virus that could infect someone or not. There's a lot more research to be done.

See https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/06/22/th...

Re: Initial Covid-19 infection rate may be 80 times greater than originally reported

#110

Post by qeternity »

amanaplanacanal wrote: post #17
qeternity wrote: post #10

History books will not be kind to our past and present handling of covid-19. Incurring incredible economic and social damage without fully understanding the threat. It’s been very clear for some time that covid is not nearly as lethal as once feared AND even more clear that we over quarantined. In the UK we have hospitals built specifically for covid that are completely unused. This isn’t flattening the curve, it’s c…

Maybe. New Zealand took a different path and managed the problem with far fewer deaths.

For now. They will have second/third waves. We’re not going to cure this before we reach herd immunity. New Zealand just delayed the inevitable (which is what flattening the curve is all about: delay infections enough so that we can reasonably treat)
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