Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.psu.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 210 posts

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

#131

Post by ageitgey »

mcv wrote: post #91
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…

From what I heard, about half the deaths are people under 55 (edit: I can't find that source anymore and all figures suggest it's wrong). The individual risk is still higher the older you are, but plenty of young people have died from this (610 in the US, for example). But even if you don't know anyone who died from it, you can still know people who are ill. My ex-brother-in-law has been in and out of the hospital 4…

> From what I heard, about half the deaths are people under 55. The individual risk is still higher the older you are, but plenty of young people have died from this.

You are incorrect. COVID is largely a disease that affects the elderly and those with pre-existing conditions. Here are the actual numbers from England (England only, not to be confused with the overall UK):

- All COVID deaths, age 0-59: 2,210

- All COVID deaths, age 60+: 25,721

And of those 2,210 people under 60 who died, only 261 didn't have known pre-existing conditions.

Also, the older age groups are actually smaller populations than the younger age groups. So the death rate is even higher than the raw numbers suggest.

If you define "young" as anyone under 40, the difference is even more stark:

- All COVID deaths, age 0-39: 224

- All COVID deaths, age 0-39, no pre-existing condition: 36

Note: Obviously the young and healthy should still avoid exposure to avoid infecting others and also because there is of course always some risk of both death and long-term damage.

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

#132

Post by chosenbreed37 »

RaceWon wrote: post #129
chosenbreed37 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - 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? My spouse and I both work in a hospital. She got covid and so did one of our two siblings. Neither of them had any symptoms (spouse is in her 50's, our sibling is twenty plus.) I never got it nor did our other sibling. I…

> My spouse and I both work in a hospital. She got covid and so did one of our two siblings. Neither of them had any symptoms (spouse is in her 50's, our sibling is twenty plus.) I never got it nor did our other sibling. I also don't have antibodies. Go figure... it makes no sense to me.

I know it's anecdotal but it's interesting that your spouse contracted the virus but you did not. I'm assuming you live together. But then again I imagine it is quite common for one person in a household to catch a cold whilst everybody remains unaffected...I'm not equating covid-19 to the common cold. It came to mind as something that appears to spread in the same way.

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

#133

Post by technothrasher »

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.

no one I asked knows anyone who was infected

I had this same experience early on, but now I get a reasonable hit rate asking people. I personally know about four people who had it, and probably about 10% of people I talk to know a similar number of people. More like 80% know somebody who knows somebody, but that data is less reliable.

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

#134

Post by chosenbreed37 »

LandR wrote: post #125
mcv wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I heard, about half the deaths are people under 55 (edit: I can't find that source anymore and all figures suggest it's wrong). The individual risk is still higher the older you are, but plenty of young people have died from this (610 in the US, for example). But even if you don't know anyone who died from it, you can still know people who are ill. My ex-brother-in-law has been in and out of the hospital 4…

In my country the breakdown for excess deaths is: 15 - 44 = 27 45 - 64 = 589 75 - 84 = 1356 85 + = 1761 If you are under 40 your risk of dying seems to be very very low.

> If you are under 40 your risk of dying seems to be very very low.

Based on the figures you provided I make that close to 0.7%. It is low but I wouldn't describe it as very very low :-)

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

#135

Post by gizmo »

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…

No, because the "flatten the curve" crowd believed that the virus was in early stages; the lockdown was to prevent uncontrolled spreading.

The virus looks super lethal when deaths are starting to pile up when only a tiny percentage of the country was believed to have been exposed. But in reality the virus had almost peaked by the time people started to panic, which made all those lockdown or flatten the curve measures pointless.

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

#136

Post by Theodores »

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.

You really need to cite sources to backup your claim regarding the other Nightingales being pretty full. I am struggling to find sources to prove they were used at all.

However, you do have an extremely valid point about what was going on with the care homes. The hospitals were vacated of 'bed blockers' at the same time as the Nightingale facilities were being built, so the old people were sent to their care homes and not to a Nightingale.

Exeter Nightingale going to open soon:

https://www.devonlive.com/news/devon-news/exeters-nightingal...

So that one has not been pretty full. It has been absolutely empty.

Bristol:

https://www.bristolpost.co.uk/news/bristol-news/bristols-nig...

Pretty Full?

Nope, just opened, no patients yet.

Moving to Wales:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-53082404

They had 17 field hospitals open up. A health economist from Swansea University said that, in hindsight, spending £166m on 46 patients was "not a good use of limited resources".

Although not technically 'Nightingale' you get the idea.

Northern Ireland?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-52651725

The Nightingale in Belfast peaked with 30 patients, before being mothballed.

I suspect that every Nightingale has a similar story.

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

#137

Post by DanBC »

Theodores wrote: post #136
DanBC wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

You really need to cite sources to backup your claim regarding the other Nightingales being pretty full. I am struggling to find sources to prove they were used at all. However, you do have an extremely valid point about what was going on with the care homes. The hospitals were vacated of 'bed blockers' at the same time as the Nightingale facilities were being built, so the old people were sent to their care homes an…

HSJ has an article about use of the nightingales. I'm struggling to find it.

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

#138

Post by jonathanstrange »

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.

How would we know that if they don't even have an antibody response? You're resorting to anecdotal evidence but there is no way to confirm this hypothesis empirically on a large scale.

I guess it depends on what you mean by "significant amount", though.

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

#139

Post by ageitgey »

gizmo wrote: post #115
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 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…

> Absolutely not. The scientific approach is to look at the new disease and see how it compares to other similar RTIs.

I think the the scientific approach is to use the best data you have at a given time and update your understanding as you get new data. You make a lot of big claims that contradict multiple specific studies with published results. It's clear you hope that the epidemic is over (as we all do). But hope isn't enough.

To quote Derek Lowe [1], a scientist working in drug discovery:

"Everyone will have seen the various population surveys with antibody testing that have suggested, in most cases, that a rather small percentage of people have been exposed. Think of the various ways you could get such a result:

(1) it’s just what it looks like, and most people are unprotected because they have so far been unexposed.

(2) the antibody results are what they look like – low exposure – but people’s T-cell responses mean that there are actually more people protected than we realize.

(3) the antibody results are deceiving, because the antibody response fades over time, meaning that more people have been exposed than it looks like.

(3a) the antibody response fades, but the T-cell response is still protective

(3b) the antibody response fades and so does the T-cell response. That last one is not a happy possibility."

So we essentially have 4 plausible scenarios that explain our best study results. We all hope it's (2) or (3a). But I wouldn't say that we have a lot of actual evidence to prove that yet.

[1] https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/06/22/th...

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

#140

Post by baxtr »

gizmo wrote: post #135
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…

No, because the "flatten the curve" crowd believed that the virus was in early stages; the lockdown was to prevent uncontrolled spreading. The virus looks super lethal when deaths are starting to pile up when only a tiny percentage of the country was believed to have been exposed. But in reality the virus had almost peaked by the time people started to panic, which made all those lockdown or flatten the curve measure…

Got it thanks. This assumption is of course undermined by the fact that seroprevalence of antibodies is not that high even in countries like Sweden. At the same time I know a person who had minor symptoms, was then tested positive in PCR but negative in a later AB test. Combine this with studies on SARS1 and MERS where only half of all asymptomatic patients developed ABs and the assumption you presented seems suddenly quite possible.

If it’s true however, the pandemic should be over in a couple of weeks?

Post reply on HN