Live data from Hacker News

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

news.psu.edu

191–200 of 210 posts

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

#191
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…

You have no cause to sound as confident as you are. You're completely wrong in the first paragraph in a way that shows you don't understand the first thing that you are talking about. For example, you say " 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…

> First, it was discovered in late December, probably jumping to humans in November

The most recent phylogenetic analysis on 7000+ viral sequences from isolates points at the end of October as a possible date.

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

#192
post #153
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?

While this paper[1] doesn't attempt to provide exact dates, the phylogenetic data suggest that there were multiple seeding "events" in each country before outbreaks were actually noticeable.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7199730/

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

#193
post #155
post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I have no idea where you get your graphs from - the chart you want is this one: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/weeklyarchives2019-2020/image... (pneumonia and influenza mortality, COVID kills via penumonia and as such is in that graph), the spike at 2019-50 is the normal flu reason (you can see we were having a slightly above normal one that started to decline out), the spike at week 10 onwards is COVID-19. Likewise, looking at ILI (influenza like illnesses), you can see the normal flu season spike near week 50, a decline towards baseline, and then a rise towards week 10 https://gis.cdc.gov/grasp/fluview/fluportaldashboard.html (ILInet line graph), followed by a decline as stay at home orders began to come into effect.

COVID emphatically was not circulating in numbers in november. We would have noticed, same as the chinese did, from the massive increase in pnuemonia clusters. Genetic analysis backs this up. You don't know what you're talking about, again.

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

#194
post #155
post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

[deleted]

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

#195
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unclaimed bodies have been buried in "mass graves" in NY for many years. It's just it didn't occur to anyone to film this from a drone before to drive clicks and outrage. The real scandal is that NY, NJ, CT, MA and a few other states allowed C19 to spread in elderly care facilities and nursing homes. NY and NJ inexplicably _sent COVID patients_ there. As of Jun 2nd, nursing homes are responsible for 40% of all US COV…

Same for Sweden.

The death rate per million in NY and NJ is almost _three times_ that of Sweden.

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

#196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'll just lay it at the feet of the people who stole ppe, shut down testing sites, encouraged people to drink bleach, refused to lockdown the nation, didn't implement contract tracing, didn't shut down the borders (only pretended to), didn't quarantine arrivals, and said that less testing will lead to less deaths. Interestingly all those assholes belong to the same political party.

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

#197
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You are conflating a lot of different things. Traffic fatalities were actually down overall (total numbers), but up per mile driven . In other words, people were driving much less and dying in lower total numbers, but the people who were driving were driving faster and thus a bit more likely to die. That article is poorly written to generate headlines and clicks. Arguing over a specific IFR is also kind of pointless…

1. My link stated that in certain areas, such as Connecticut, traffic fatalities went up.

2. My overall point is that a certain number of excess deaths are atrributable to the lockdown itself, rather than Covid. IIRC, the total number of reported deaths in NYC from heart disease, heart attacks, cancer, and a whole bunch of other diseases went down drastically; either Covid-19 magically cures all these other ailments, or a bunch of deaths are being mislabelled as Covid-related.

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

#198
post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think for most people dying is the scary outcome, like you say it's very very unlikely for a healthy young person. But what is the odds that you survive but then require kidney transplant or lung transplant or have leave ICU only to face weeks or months of recovery. This latter bit is a unknown to me, so I don't know what my actual risk is.

> only to face weeks or months of recovery. FTR, this also happens with other respiratory diseases. You can also take quite a bit of time (months) to fully recover from "regular" pneumonia.

It's called flu. Which are basically two diseases, first the bacterial infection in all the dead cells the T-cells killed. In the lung this is pneumonia. Pretty serious stuff.

Second the rampage the T-cells are doing elsewhere to fight suspected virus cells. They might attack way too many healthy cells everywhere. This is called the cykotine storm, treated with standard cykotine storm suppressors. The virus itself is doing nothing, it just causes the immunosystem to overreact.

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

#199

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…

> something something car drive risk wwii bomber

This line of defense completely ignores the long term damage that we know occurs in some Covid cases, even those in young people. Pneumonia can cause long term damage too. Saying the risk (I assume of death) is less ignores the incalculable risk of life long lung damage.

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

#200
post #49

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.

Unclaimed bodies have been buried in "mass graves" in NY for many years. It's just it didn't occur to anyone to film this from a drone before to drive clicks and outrage. The real scandal is that NY, NJ, CT, MA and a few other states allowed C19 to spread in elderly care facilities and nursing homes. NY and NJ inexplicably _sent COVID patients_ there. As of Jun 2nd, nursing homes are responsible for 40% of all US COV…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN