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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

#111

Post by DanBC »

qeternity wrote: post #108
martin_bech wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

We have pretty good ideas of what normal death rates are like, and we see huge numbers of excess mortality.

> that covid barely registers as a blip?

What figures are you looking at for all cause mortality please?

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

#112

Post by qeternity »

DanBC wrote: post #89
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…

> we have hospitals built specifically for covid that are completely unused. Only the London nightingale went "unused", and that's because government is pursuing herd immunity by discharging older people to care and nursing homes, not to the Nightingale. It wasn't "completely" unused. And the other Nightingales were pretty full.

They were only full to keep other hospitals free and less contaminated. The overall additional capacity was hardly used.

I’m also saying something different: we should have quarantined to the lowest possible degree that kept the hospitals reasonably utilized. We need infections. We just don’t want to overload NHS. I’m glad we built new capacity. I’m frustrated we didn’t use it...and now a big second wave is likely.

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

#113

Post by legulere »

christkv wrote: post #9
gvjddbnvdrbv wrote: post #3

How does this reconcile with the actual data we have on total infection rate in e.g. Spain where a representative poll was done?

We now know a significant amount of people have no symptoms or very light symptoms and no antibody response. An anecdote. My friend and his wife got tested when giving birth. She was positive for antibodies he was not. It is quite possible that for ever person who had antibodies there is some unknown x of people who got it and never developed antibodies.

People without symptoms are also much less likely to spread. So likely your friend really didn’t get infected.

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

#114

Post by legulere »

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.

And probably a better economic outcome.

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

#115

Post by gizmo »

ageitgey wrote: post #47
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.

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 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 better evidence so act like the worst case".

Absolutely not. The scientific approach is to look at the new disease and see how it compares to other similar RTIs. For instance, covid19 was discovered around October at the start of the seasonal flu season in the northern hemisphere and it was a coronavirus, which makes it 95% likely to be strongly seasonal, highly infectious, and mild. It also should lead us to assume that exposure to prior viruses gives (some) protection, and that the elderly and immunocompromised are the most at risk. In addition, we know that diseases like this spread highly unevenly (powerlaw distribution) with a small number of big hotspots and many places that are left largely unaffected.

This is the BASELINE SCENARIO, based on the knowledge we have of hundreds of similar respiratory infections. Covid19 could be a different animal, but for that we'd have to carefully look at the data.

But what did we do? We took seriously the doom-saying of scientists that extrapolated from comically unrepresentative cruise ship data and other hot spots. This is junk science, because data from a hot spot doesn't say --anything-- about how infectious a hotspot disease is or how deadly, except that it's possible for people to die from it, but that's also entirely unsurprising for a RTI.

> At the peak of this epidemic in hard-hit places like the UK, something like only 1 in 400 people are known to have been infected at a time.

Impossible. Covid reached Europe by December, and has spread like wildfire since.

> Many younger people (as much as 70%) show absolutely no symptoms when they are infected.

Oh no, way more than 70%. How many kids got visible symptoms? Close to zero. And many got infected because the virus is absolutely everywhere. At least 70% of people in the 50-65 age group have no visible symptoms, so for young people the number must be drastically higher.

> The disease is astronomically worse for elderly people.

All cause mortality isn't high worldwide. We had two mild flu seasons in a row and that left us with many elderly with a negative life expectancy.

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

#116

Post by DanBC »

jakeogh wrote: post #37
martin_bech wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

These numbers would be much more useful if they were in pairs; (#people, #avg_years_lost). https://abcnews.go.com/Health/swine-flu-h1n1-pandemic-deaths... "Though the virus was deadly, the swine flu pandemic is still considered to have been a fairly mild one. The CDC calculates that up to 575,000 people may have died from H1N1 in 2009. The WHO estimates that the seasonal flu kills up to 500,000 people each year. Both…

So far the best data we have shows that for people in their 60s covid-19 is killing them about ten years early.

See eg this from Economist: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/05/02/would-mo...

https://www.gla.ac.uk/news/headline_720672_en.html

> “As most people dying with COVID-19 are older with underlying chronic conditions, some have speculated that the impact of the condition may have been overstated, and that the actual number of years of life lost as a result of COVID-19 are relatively low,” said Dr McAllister.

> “This new analysis found that death from COVID-19 results in over 10 years of life lost per person, even after taking account of the typical number and type of chronic conditions found in people dying of COVID-19. Among people dying of COVID-19, the number of years of life lost PER PERSON appear similar to diseases such as coronary heart disease. Information such as this is important to ensure governments and the public do not wrongly underestimate the effects of COVID-19 on individuals,” he added.

https://wellcomeopenresearch.org/articles/5-75

> Results: Using the standard WHO life tables, YLL per COVID-19 death was 14 for men and 12 for women. After adjustment for number and type of LTCs, the mean YLL was slightly lower, but remained high (13 and 11 years for men and women, respectively). The number and type of LTCs led to wide variability in the estimated YLL at a given age (e.g. at ≥80 years, YLL was >10 years for people with 0 LTCs, and > Conclusions: Deaths from COVID-19 represent a substantial burden in terms of per-person YLL, more than a decade, even after adjusting for the typical number and type of LTCs found in people dying of COVID-19. The extent of multimorbidity heavily influences the estimated YLL at a given age. More comprehensive and standardised collection of data on LTCs is needed to better understand and quantify the global burden of COVID-19 and to guide policy-making and interventions.

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

#117

Post by misja111 »

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.

It's the curse of the media. Infection rate might be only a few percent, death rate no more than a percent of that, but if you follow the media you get the feeling that we are in the middle of a new bubonic plague.

This is the same phenomenon that makes people to be more scared of flying than to take the car even though the latter is far more dangerous.

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

#118

Post by lbeltrame »

saberdancer wrote: post #106
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 th…

I argue that in Lombardia (where I live) the virus found niches of vulnerable populations (nursing care homes, hospitals like Alzano Lombardo which weren't closed after infections were found) and then proceeded to cut them down.

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

#119

Post by chimprich »

AmericanChopper wrote: post #105
chimprich wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

"Presumed to have died from it" is quite a long way from "anybody who could have potentially been infected".

Doctor friends tell me it's usually pretty clear when they have a COVID patient.

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

#120

Post by jmull »

jjjensen90 wrote: post #15
gvjddbnvdrbv wrote: post #3

How does this reconcile with the actual data we have on total infection rate in e.g. Spain where a representative poll was done?

Because it's possible that there are many, many infected who don't seroconvert or ever manifest symptoms, and therefore would not have been tested with a PCR test, and would have a negative antibody test. We can see this in effect in studies of household attack rates and seroconversion. See this recent preprint and interesting thread (/r/covid19 is a strict science sub, not to be confused with /r/coronavirus) https:/…

Well, this study estimates covid 19 by looking at survey data on influenza-like-illnesses. That means they were counting people who had flu-like symptoms.

Any potential people with covid19 but no symptoms would be above and beyond what’s being raised here.

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