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Infection fatality rate of Covid-19 inferred from seroprevalence data [pdf]

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Re: Infection fatality rate of Covid-19 inferred from seroprevalence data [pdf]

#261

Post by spaetzleesser »

moralsupply wrote: post #135
bleepblorp wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's generally illegal, outside of narrow circumstances, to fire guns in populated areas largely because stray bullets will kill people. Stray respiratory droplets exhaled by people infected with SARS-CoV-2 will also kill people. Presumably you're OK with rules that prevent people from firing guns in public. Why are you not OK with rules that are intended to reduce the risk of people unnecessarily spreading fatal inf…

The idea of a "causal nexus" is not accepted in any law system (natural or positive). The fact something can happen due to your actions can't be used as an ethical argument to limit your freedom of action. From the perspective of individual freedoms the ban of guns is unacceptable under the pretense they might end up harming others by chance; if that's the case, the police and the military themselves shouldn't have g…

"Also under the perspective of individual freedoms, the enforcement of masks is not justifiable. If you feel unsafe due to a potential virus outbreak, take your precautions but don't force others to do whatever they want to do. Otherwise, we'd fall into authoritarianism"

How about a slight rewrite:

"Also under the perspective of individual freedoms, the enforcement of restrictions on release of toxic or radioactive substances is not justifiable. If you feel unsafe due to a potential radiation release, take your precautions but don't force others to stop releasing radioactive substances into the environment. Otherwise, we'd fall into authoritarianism."

You understand that masks are meant to protect others, not the wearer?

"Besides, populations that live under strict gun control surprisingly have more people being harmed by guns than populations that don't have strict gun controls (case in point: criminals don't care about laws, by definition)."

People in Germany, France and many other countries would probably not agree with that.

Re: Infection fatality rate of Covid-19 inferred from seroprevalence data [pdf]

#262

Post by beagle3 »

matthewmacleod wrote: post #242
tsimionescu wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of your analysis falls apart at one crucial point: all of the data we have are for Covid19 IFR given the massive lockdowns and dedicated hospital infrastructure . If you look at regions that were ineffective in handling the spread and had their hospital capacity overwhelmed, mortality jumps through the roof - I think it was higher than 10% in Lombardia before the lockdowns. And remember that hospitals can't work…

I am genuinely baffled by the number of people who are slipping around this point. We don’t regularly have hospital ITUs stuffed full of people with influenza, threatening to overwhelm capacity. We don’t generally have city-, region- and country-wide lockdowns where transmission is massively curtailed. Even a very casual look at what happened in different countries makes it clear that this disease has an obviously di…

It's not as simple as that.

Early on, people with low blood oxygen were put on ventilators quickly, which both took a great toll on the system, and didn't help (or even made things worse).

If you look at the graphs now (I looked at 30 countries just an hour ago), you'll see that many countries in Europe have a very visible "second wave", including Denmark, Austria, the UK, France, Spain and even Sweden - but almost no deaths; and unlike the first wave, despite more people diagnosed with SARS-COV-2, much less people need treatment, and there is no lack of beds anywhere (although there is a lot of fatigue, which is a more complicated discussion).

Given you know what to do, such as prawning, vitamin D, and more (and more importantly - what not to do - no early ventilation, for example) - then, we no longer have hospital ICUs stuffed full of people with COVID19 either.

A lot has changed since April, but when I look at arguments, some sides still hold the data from early April (assuming up to 5% IFR, and the Ferguson predictions), while some do not acknowledge that April happened and only look at the stats in Aug-Sep. Not surprisingly, such arguments aren't really converging and each side tends to assume the other side is an idiot or insane.

Re: Infection fatality rate of Covid-19 inferred from seroprevalence data [pdf]

#263

Post by nwah1 »

joe_the_user wrote: post #256
nwah1 wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is reporting an IFR you disagree with the same as denying germ theory?

I didn't say Ioannidis denied germ theory. What I implied was that he seems to put findings based on germ theory in the same category as the often/generally false/debatable findings of experimental psychology. Then he publishes findings based on completely selective uses of data, apparently with the attitude "nothing is true, I'll take the truth I like".

Did you read his California study? He sampled blood, and came up with a number. You are inferring a whole lot from that.

Re: Infection fatality rate of Covid-19 inferred from seroprevalence data [pdf]

#264

Post by mrkurt »

makomk wrote: post #166
mrkurt wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The sad reality is that broad, indiscriminate lockdowns are the only real tool available to some "world powers". We know we can manage the covid pandemic with ubiquitous testing and targeted temporary lockdowns. But there is no testing capacity. Which means ... it's not really possible to rethink the lockdown strategies. Given a choice between a thing that directly kills people, and something that more people die fro…

One of the more... interesting things about Covid-19 is that the countries everyone thinks are stuck with indiscriminate lockdown as their only tool due to lack of testing capacity actually have the most testing capacity, and the one everyone points to as a mass testing success story has about an order of magnitude less in per capita terms and is likely severely limited in their ability to actually detect cases as a…

Do you have details? A quick glance here shows low positive test rates in the countries that seem to be doing the best. Low positive test rates seem like adequate testing.

https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-testing

Re: Infection fatality rate of Covid-19 inferred from seroprevalence data [pdf]

#265

Post by nwah1 »

MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #221
NelsonMinar wrote: post #155

The author, John Ioannidis, is a discredited researcher on Covid-19. He and his Stanford colleages are responsible for a terribly written antibody study done back in March on residents of Santa Clara County. The statistics in that paper were egregiously bad and seem cooked to meet foregone political conclusions. Some reporting: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/stephaniemlee/ioannidis... https://www.mercurynews.co…

As with all statistical bullshitters, Taleb has smelled it back it April. Think of the man what you want, but whenever he is putting his reputation on the line and publicly accuses someone else of statistical ignorance, he turns out to be correct.

He embarrassed himself with Nate Silver, Stephen Pinker, and most other disputes I've ever seem him wage. Not to mention being notoriously moody on twitter, and cozying up to alt-right trolls. If you are just relying on the supposed credibility of Taleb, you are relying on nothing.

Re: Infection fatality rate of Covid-19 inferred from seroprevalence data [pdf]

#266

Post by ceejayoz »

__blockcipher__ wrote: post #171
ceejayoz wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've got plenty of concrete evidence COVID infections can result in long-lasting chronic symptoms. That's sufficient reason to be cautious until we know the rate.

We actually don’t have this evidence. If anything we have strong evidence of the opposite. SARS-2 radiological abnormalities resolve in months and this is for hospitalized cases which are by definition more severe than your usual cases. There is really no evidence of what you claim. We’re now 7 months into the major part of this pandemic and people are still stuck citing the fears we all had in April.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02598-6

> Evidence from people infected with other coronaviruses suggests that the damage will linger for some. A study published in February recorded long-term lung harm from SARS, which is caused by SARS-CoV-1. Between 2003 and 2018, Peixun Zhang at Peking University People’s Hospital in Beijing and his colleagues tracked the health of 71 people who had been hospitalized with SARS. Even after 15 years, 4.6% still had visible lesions on their lungs, and 38% had reduced diffusion capacity, meaning that their lungs were poor at transferring oxygen into the blood and removing carbon dioxide from it.

Re: Infection fatality rate of Covid-19 inferred from seroprevalence data [pdf]

#267

Post by ceejayoz »

aga98mtl wrote: post #158
ceejayoz wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've got plenty of concrete evidence COVID infections can result in long-lasting chronic symptoms. That's sufficient reason to be cautious until we know the rate.

Considering that there has been tens of millions of people with a covid infection, where are these people with chronic symptoms?

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02598-6

> Symptoms might take a long time to fade; a study posted on the preprint server medRxiv in August followed up on people who had been hospitalized, and found that even a month after being discharged, more than 70% were reporting shortness of breath and 13.5% were still using oxygen at home.

> One study of 143 people with COVID-19 discharged from a hospital in Rome found that 53% had reported fatigue and 43% had shortness of breath an average of 2 months after their symptoms started. A study of patients in China showed that 25% had abnormal lung function after 3 months, and that 16% were still fatigued.

Re: Infection fatality rate of Covid-19 inferred from seroprevalence data [pdf]

#268

Post by [deleted] »

anoncake wrote: post #243
sterlind wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sure hope that sick people continue to wear masks once this is all over. It's basic human decency to avoid spreading germs - even the flu - to others, especially elders. This is the norm in Asia. After COVID ends, I won't wear a mask if I'm healthy but I sure as hell will if I have a cough or fever.

You can cough and sneeze into a mask if you want. I think it's disgusting.

[deleted]

Re: Infection fatality rate of Covid-19 inferred from seroprevalence data [pdf]

#269

Post by ojnabieoot »

em500 wrote: post #23
asadkn wrote: post #5

Some people will misinterpret the conclusion. It varies significantly by age brackets not considered in the paper. A 40 year old would be mistaken to assume their fatality chance is 0.31%.

Right, according to https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.23.20160895v... (table 3) its probably just a bit over 0.06% for 40 year olds.

In context - this is less for you than for the "COVID is no big deal" folks - that's 5x the annual likelihood of a 40-year-old dying in a car crash in the United States, and about 60x the likelihood of a 40-year-old dying of the swine flu during the 2009 epidemic.

So COVID is in fact very dangerous for 40-year-olds. Pose a thought experiment: if someone said "would you go out drinking with your friends tonight if there was a 10% chance that, for the next 12 months, you'll be 5x as likely to die in a car crash than baseline?" I would say "absolutely not, why would you even ask me this?" and I certainly wouldn't take that risk over-and-over again for such a petty reason.

Re: Infection fatality rate of Covid-19 inferred from seroprevalence data [pdf]

#270

Post by undersuit »

marvin wrote: post #139
rossdavidh wrote: post #2

For comparison, from what I've read the typical annual influenza fatality rate is around 0.1% (don't know what the under-70 rate would be). So, this puts covid-19 solidly in the uncanny valley of viral mortality rates; not low enough to be "just like a flu", not high enough to justify shutting down the world. No wonder opinions on it are so divided.

Covid-19 is perfectly evolutionarily adapted to fit into this gap. Its divisive ability has practically been evolutionarily selected for.

That's wonderful, the virus is literally political.
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