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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

#151

Post by CydeWeys »

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.

This article is talking about several months ago, back when our testing infrastructure was severely limited. What's that got to do with now? The hospitals were absolutely overflowing back then and the daily death count was staggering. But the strict lockdowns worked and we got it under control. Now the virus is spreading rapidly again and if it continues uncontained we will end up back in that hospitals overflowing and staggering death tolls situation again in a few weeks in the worst-hit states of Arizona, South Carolina, Arkansas, Florida, Utah, and Texas.

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

#152

Post by arrrg »

grey-area wrote: post #80
arrrg wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But does this get us a lot? In Brooklyn and Queens between 0.2 and 0.25 percent of the total population (!) died. So this sort of puts a floor on the IFR and 0.2 is not that far off from the IFR determined through serological testing – maybe a half or a third of that. So yeah, maybe there is an effect – but can it really be a drastic effect? I don’t think there are orders of magnitude of difference in there, maybe a…

But looking at NYC now, after peaking in April, infections and deaths are way down and stabilised, in spite of rising infections in surrounding areas and very few travel restrictions. So something is going on that we don't understand, and it could have a significant impact. If we have a higher immune population than we think, NYC might have passed the worst, if not millions will die in a second wave (though there are…

New York obviously “benefits” from an intensive first wave. Every additional infection makes spread harder for the virus.

As many European countries show (including Germany, where the infected population is very low, much lower than the European average, much much lower than Italy or Spain) it’s very possible to keep the epidemic at a low, simmering level without extremely drastic lockdowns.

Given a probably pretty low K value it’s also often sufficient to not be super-efficient about prevention. Some efficiency goes a long way.

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

#153

Post by arrrg »

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…

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

Can you source this claim?

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

#154

Post by arrrg »

ddxxdd wrote: post #73
ageitgey wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How you label the deaths is not that big of a deal in the larger scale. If you want to know the true toll of the epidemic, just look at this year's deaths vs. an average of previous years. It's simple and transparent. Here's that data for England: https://imgur.com/sxoolBX I get why everyone is questioning everything, but there isn't some big conspiracy here. Lots of people died of COVID. Most of them were 80+. You p…

But then we get to the question of whether those deaths were caused by COVID or other causes. We know that traffic fatalities in some areas have risen drastically due to the lockdowns: https://abc7.com/traffic-fatalities-california-highway-patro... We also know that doctor visits have gone down due to the coronavirus, leading to medical staff being laid off: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/04/02/826232…

> And there are German serological studies that suggest a COVID death rate of 0.39%, in contrast with the NYC study that claims a death rate of 1%

That’s in the same ballpark. You can expect great precision with these estimations.

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

#155

Post by gizmo »

arrrg wrote: post #153
gizmo wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Impossible. Covid reached Europe by December, and has spread like wildfire since. Can you source this claim?

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-italy-...

That's one.

And CDC data shows that Covid was already widespread in October 2019:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EZNQ9arUEAAS9W9?format=png&name=...

With a spike in abnormal deaths 24 days later in November. For covid deaths to be clearly visible in November it must have been widespread a month before that, and starting its spread around September.

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

#156

Post by valarauko »

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.

Apologies, but the text makes it seem like your spouse is also your sibling.

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

#157

Post by gizmo »

ageitgey wrote: post #109
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? 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 t…

> it's not clear that asymptomatic infections are as infectious as symptomatic infections

Yes it is clear (they're not)! Superspreading events are caused by people who are clearly symptomatic but don't act responsibly. Most spreading in total happens via nonsymptomatic or presymptomatic people, because covid19 is a coronavirus and that's how coronaviruses work. No point in pretending this is some kind of big unknown.

If you don't believe me, let's look at this story of army recruits. Those who tested positive were isolated, those who remained tested negative and trained together with masks and social distancing. Result, 8 days later 142 out of 640 tested positive. https://outline.com/dK2TWd

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

#158

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

cynusx wrote: post #97
chrisco255 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is number of infections not number of hospitalizations. This study implies the disease is orders of magnitude less deadly than we thought.

I'm actually annoyed we still don't know the exact death rate of the virus. I am not sure if it would be that unethical to call up volunteers that reflect the general population to establish the real death rate. (even less so if you reward them economically) If it is orders of magnitude less deadly then that should have enormous policy implications.

Diseases unfortunately don't have a real death rate; the death rate of diseases tends to vary widely between populations for inscrutable reasons. Even if we had a study determining an 0.3% death rate among a statistically representative sample, we couldn't make policy under the assumption it's below 0.5% and couldn't be absolutely certain it's not 1%.

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

#159

Post by lolc »

gizmo wrote: post #147
ageitgey wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Scientific consensus takes years to form, so any claim I make will be contradicted by some scientific findings and affirmed by others. What I outlined in the part you quoted is the null hypothesis: that this new coronavirus behaves like the other coronaviruses we are familiar with. That may of course turn out to be false, but it's indisputably the correct starting point for any serious analysis. My objection was that…

I'm all for discussing how to best deal with the virus and which measures best contain the spread. Sweden is an interesting experiment. But your sources are lo-fi. I was unable to read the second picture. Check out https://euromomo.eu for a good source.

> For instance we see that Sweden that didn't lock down has practically indistinguishable All Cause Deaths outcomes as the neighboring Nordics[1].

Sweden had very high excess mortality compared to its neighbors and is still showing abnormally high. For Norway and Finland the numbers remained flat. Your plot sums up the entire winter and stops at week 18! It's decidedly not fine-grained enough to judge lock-down effects.

> New coronavirus just like other known coronaviruses.

Even for younger people we haven't seen a peak in deaths like that in a while. Looking at Euromomo the age bracket 15-44 years saw a 15% increase in deaths during a whole month. An unprecedented increase in the last five years. We don't know how much worse the numbers would be without lock-down. And it's not over yet.

Please don't say that the virus is "just like other coronaviruses". Most of them are benign and not even tracked that much. So we know little about them. SARS-Cov2 can well be compared to SARS-Cov which is extinct. Luckily.

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

#160

Post by mercer »

lol768 wrote: post #107
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…

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 a…

It's been exactly the same story for someone I know. They had a mild-but-less-mild-than-usual flu in March that was 'strange' in all the ways covid-19 is said to be. They had 'issues' like yours well into April and still don't feel 100%. No official diagnosis though.
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