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Preliminary test results suggest 21% of NYC residents have Covid antibodies

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Re: Preliminary test results suggest 21% of NYC residents have Covid antibodies

#271

Post by dragonwriter »

izend wrote: post #198
mrb wrote: post #183

If this study is accurate, then 1.8 million NYC resident are infected. So 15 411 deaths (as of today, including 5 121 probable deaths) suggests COVID-19 has a fatality rate of MINIMUM 0.9% which is in line with previous estimates (between 0.5 and 1.6%) and this is MINIMUM 9 times more fatal than the flu (0.1%). Edited to add "MINIMUM", as there is a lag between case detection and death (I should have known better to…

Making it the worse pandemic in decades but no where near the Spanish Flu.

Well, sure, but the “Spanish” flu (only called that because Spain is the first country severely hit that didn't lie and cover it up because of WWI) was accelerated by both the physical conditions created by WWI and the fact that covering it up to avoid revealing weakness to wartime opponents hampered response in many early-hit countries and obstructed information flow.

It's also nowhere near the HIV/AIDS global epidemic in likely total impact, but it's a lot more acute in it's impact than HIV/AIDS.

Re: Preliminary test results suggest 21% of NYC residents have Covid antibodies

#273

Post by mediaman »

dragonwriter wrote: post #262
mrb wrote: post #183

If this study is accurate, then 1.8 million NYC resident are infected. So 15 411 deaths (as of today, including 5 121 probable deaths) suggests COVID-19 has a fatality rate of MINIMUM 0.9% which is in line with previous estimates (between 0.5 and 1.6%) and this is MINIMUM 9 times more fatal than the flu (0.1%). Edited to add "MINIMUM", as there is a lag between case detection and death (I should have known better to…

> If this study is accurate, then 1.8 million NYC resident are infected. So 10 290 deaths (as of today) suggests COVID-19 has a fatality rate of 0.6% No, it doesn't, because the usual time to death, if it causes death, isn't zero, so you need to compare the number of deaths a couple weeks from now with the number of infections today to get a closer-to-accurate number. Also, you are using the 10,290 confirmed deaths a…

Interesting thought experiment: if NY daily deaths over the next two weeks average 400, that's 5,600 upcoming deaths from people presumably infected now. If about one-third of deaths are not accounted for (5,121 unidentified as a portion of identified+unidentified), then we'd have about 8,400 new deaths projected over two weeks including the likely unidentified deaths.

As a percentage of those who were infected as of this study, that's a 1.3% infection fatality rate.

Obviously some conjecture and estimates there, but it seems to be on the high range of early estimates (though much lower than the 3%+ rates derived from CFR with undercounted denominator).

Re: Preliminary test results suggest 21% of NYC residents have Covid antibodies

#274

Post by zucker42 »

godelski wrote: post #145
ccleve wrote: post #17

This study doesn't appear to suffer from the same methodology problems as the Stanford study of a few days ago. In that study, they recruited people through Facebook, and reported an infection rate that was low enough that it could have been caused by false positives. Here, it's closer to a random sample, but more importantly it shows really high rates. Those rates overwhelm any error due to false positives. Also, it…

Why does recruiting through Facebook invalidate the results? If it is a representative sample it is a representative sample regardless of how people were recruited.

The Facebook ad essentially said "get tested for COVID-19 here", so very plausibly infected people could be more likely to respond.

Re: Preliminary test results suggest 21% of NYC residents have Covid antibodies

#275

Post by bo1024 »

mrb wrote: post #183

If this study is accurate, then 1.8 million NYC resident are infected. So 15 411 deaths (as of today, including 5 121 probable deaths) suggests COVID-19 has a fatality rate of MINIMUM 0.9% which is in line with previous estimates (between 0.5 and 1.6%) and this is MINIMUM 9 times more fatal than the flu (0.1%). Edited to add "MINIMUM", as there is a lag between case detection and death (I should have known better to…

Note that deaths lag positive cases by some time (2 weeks maybe?).

Re: Preliminary test results suggest 21% of NYC residents have Covid antibodies

#276

Post by exclipy »

tunesmith wrote: post #75
ccleve wrote: post #17

This study doesn't appear to suffer from the same methodology problems as the Stanford study of a few days ago. In that study, they recruited people through Facebook, and reported an infection rate that was low enough that it could have been caused by false positives. Here, it's closer to a random sample, but more importantly it shows really high rates. Those rates overwhelm any error due to false positives. Also, it…

Sorry, can someone spell out how this might be good news? 21% is still a long way from herd immunity, and NYC's hospital system has been severely strained getting to this point. On top of that, the hospitalization rate still seems disproportionate to someone getting the flu - maybe it's five times as fatal, but it's > 5x the flu hospitalization rate. It's not like the virus has become less dangerous, we're just reali…

21% sounds much closer (eg. months) to herd immunity than previous estimates (eg. up to a decade).

Re: Preliminary test results suggest 21% of NYC residents have Covid antibodies

#277

Post by legulere »

DeonPenny wrote: post #73
vkou wrote: post #24

If this study is accurate, and is not just working on garbage data, and if these antibodies actually mean long-term immunity, this means one of two things: 1. If the lockdown is lifted, we will see another ~60,000 to 100,000 deaths in NYC, before it will hit herd immunity. 2. Or, the lockdown will continue. The accuracy of antibody studies has been called into doubt, and as far as I know, nobody has ever followed up…

We'd also need to make the decsision to continue a lockdown over a virus with a 99.5% survival rate or not. Seeing at the flu has a 99.9% survival rate does it make sense to destroy the economy over that.

Stating the survival rate really hides how there is around an order of magnitude difference in the death rate.

And that ignoring that while immunity towards various types of influenza is widespread, there is no previous immunity against COVID-19 apart from a handful of people that had SARS or MERS before.

Re: Preliminary test results suggest 21% of NYC residents have Covid antibodies

#278

Post by sbohacek »

taeric wrote: post #162
op00to wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do non-severe cases cause lung damage too? Is the lung damage heal able?

That is the point of my question. There has been no evidence of damage in non severe cases. Indeed, we are having to get complicated testing to find out many people had it at all.

While this is anecdotal, it indicates that people with no symptoms can have lung damage (pneumonia), but not necessarily long-term damage:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/20/opinion/coronavirus-testi...

Re: Preliminary test results suggest 21% of NYC residents have Covid antibodies

#279

Post by mrb »

izend wrote: post #198
mrb wrote: post #183

If this study is accurate, then 1.8 million NYC resident are infected. So 15 411 deaths (as of today, including 5 121 probable deaths) suggests COVID-19 has a fatality rate of MINIMUM 0.9% which is in line with previous estimates (between 0.5 and 1.6%) and this is MINIMUM 9 times more fatal than the flu (0.1%). Edited to add "MINIMUM", as there is a lag between case detection and death (I should have known better to…

Making it the worse pandemic in decades but no where near the Spanish Flu.

I disagree. It's simply too early to make that determination.

The Spanish Flu had a estimated infection fatality ratio of >2.5% (https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/12/1/05-0979_article). As another commenter pointed out, the COVID-19 IFR is 0.9% in NYC. The difference between 2.5% and 0.9% is only 2.8x. However the IFR is not only underestimated due to the lag between case detection and death, but it's also probably a lot worse in many other parts of the world (third world countries, etc). So it's possible the difference is only 2-fold, which would make both pandemics relatively comparable.

Re: Preliminary test results suggest 21% of NYC residents have Covid antibodies

#280

Post by gdulli »

DeonPenny wrote: post #214
mrb wrote: post #183

If this study is accurate, then 1.8 million NYC resident are infected. So 15 411 deaths (as of today, including 5 121 probable deaths) suggests COVID-19 has a fatality rate of MINIMUM 0.9% which is in line with previous estimates (between 0.5 and 1.6%) and this is MINIMUM 9 times more fatal than the flu (0.1%). Edited to add "MINIMUM", as there is a lag between case detection and death (I should have known better to…

It's also lower than the 3% that was predicted that people used to justify the shutdown and closer inline with the swine flu or rotovirus.

The shutdown addresses more qualitative aspects of the situation. Even if flattening the curve doesn't reduce the area under the curve, it still avoids a potential large numbers of otherwise avoidable deaths because fewer people have it at once, keeping hospitals under capacity, and more people will get it later when we know better how to treat it.

And the earliest predictions have to be the least accurate, because they're based on the least amount of data. But early on is when you need to act.

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