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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

#161

Post by anoncake »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #158
cynusx wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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%.

Yes, we could and should make policy under the best data available even if we'd prefer better ones.

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

#162

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

hootbootscoot wrote: post #54
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…

Ha! That kinda flies in the face of facts. The UK and the US did NOT "over-quarantine" and this is precisely the problem. Nations, even some bad-old-authoritarian ones, that didn't dilly-dally and turn the question of lockdown into a political issue, but took it as a public health issue, those are the nations that are re-opening now with low enough numbers to claim to be over the first wave. The Tory's and GOP's trea…

It seems to me that the Tories and GOP correctly understood that it was a political football, and their friends across the aisle would start organizing mass gatherings the instant it was politically convenient for them to do so. I certainly think there's something to be said for nations that were willing to reliably comply with pandemic control measures, and I'm very glad I live in a region of the US that did comply (even in our gun stores everyone's wearing masks!), but I don't think you can lay this at the feet of some particular political parties.

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

#163

Post by anoncake »

crooked-v wrote: post #46
jakeogh wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Sure... and then consider that, unlike swine flu or seasonal flu, COVID-19 has already killed hundreds of thousands of people even with near-total lockdowns to the point of dystopic absurdity in many countries†, has done so over the course of only a few months, and due to lackluster government response in some countries is still increasing exponentially in some places. † See China's brief use of 'only specific design…

You can't deduce the gravity of a threat from the state's response to it. Just consider the ~0 killed by terrorism each year in western countries vs the security theater at airports.

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

#164

Post by koheripbal »

cube2222 wrote: post #19
christkv wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

IANAD, but you can have similar antibodies (which test positive) from previous infections with similar coronaviruses, not this one specifically. So somebody who had no exposure to COVID-19 could test positive. Afaik that's the main drawback of the antibody test.

The antibody test specifically tests for a protein that only exists on covid-19.

A positive test result is much more reliable than a negative result.

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

#165

Post by koheripbal »

peteretep wrote: post #61
christkv wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 you end up without antibodies? The virus just failed to replicate in your system and died out of its own accord? Or are we suggesting the people with no symptoms are still asymptomic carriers?

It doesnt mean thee are no antibodies It means the antibody test doesnt test the right protein.

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

#166

Post by fastball »

vertex-four wrote: post #148
fastball wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I guess I should say you can have a pandemic without a fear-mongering news media that significantly exacerbates it. I personally am not "fearful" of COVID-19, as are many (most) people I know, so it is clearly possible for the general human.

If you're not fearful and nor are most people you know, who are you claiming is fearful? Personally, my behaviour patterns have changed. I'm more aware of when someone I don't know is near me. When I hear about the vulnerable people in my close community who suddenly have to navigate the world with significantly increased risk, I feel worried for them.

I'm not claiming anyone is fearful?

I claimed you can have a pandemic without fear.

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

#167

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

anoncake wrote: post #161
SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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%.

Yes, we could and should make policy under the best data available even if we'd prefer better ones.

I don't think that's true. It's very dangerous to make epidemic policy without accounting for model uncertainty, because by the time your model's clearly and unambiguously falsified it may be too late to deal with it.

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

#168

Post by ericd »

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…

Anecdotally, I know at least one person in their early 30s who was seriously ill for a month. He got turned away from hospitals and testing, but he couldn’t sleep well for about a month because he had to consciously think about breathing. Saying “it‘s as dangerous as a 200 mile car ride” obviously doesn’t really capture the full picture.

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

#169

Post by gizmo »

lolc wrote: post #159
gizmo wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hig…

If you're just going to ignore the charts I posted what's the point? I already provided you with a chart that shows that, in fact, Sweden does not have exceptional all cause mortality. Not compared to its neighbors and not compared to previous years in Sweden. Yes, the chart is a month old, but if nothing exceptional is going on by May and covid deaths have steadily declined since[1] there really isn't a story here.

Euromomo data is preprocessed data and not suitable for analysis. Get the raw all cause mortality statistics (by age group if possible) directly from each country health agency, and use that instead.

[1] https://adamaltmejd.se/covid/

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

#170

Post by sershe »

DanBC wrote: post #116
jakeogh wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, a…

So what this says, basically, that if comparing to the deaths and other effects from lockdowns on general population, given its age, covid deaths are to be divided by 5 or so, before even adjusting for age (I'd assume most would rather lose their 80ies than their 30ies).

Then you can consider even trivial DALY adjustments for e.g. starvation (at some point, it was expected to affect 130 million extra people, by some relevant UN body), unemployment, lack of "non essential" medical care (see estimates for excess cancer deaths from the last financial crisis due to lack of care), etc., and multiply by numbers affected.

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