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Covid may be far more widespread than we thought

economist.com

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Re: Covid may be far more widespread than we thought

#31

Post by dhc02 »

jrfinkel wrote: post #9
Gibbon1 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who do we believe a bullshit artist at the economist or Bob Wachter Chair, UCSF Dept of Medicine. > @Bob_Wachter > 3/ Another interesting #: @ucsf, we only test pts w/ symptoms, who all think "I have Covid.” But only ~4% of our tests are +, meaning most folks who think they have it, don’t. https://twitter.com/Bob_Wachter/status/1247722427620012032

I don’t think it’s that simple about the tests. They’re less accurate than people think. Here’s one article about it (if you google you can find more): https://www.wsj.com/articles/questions-about-accuracy-of-cor... Also, if you don’t trust the WSJ either (I wouldn’t blame you) here is an article from Nature Medicine that has a comparison of nasal vs stool tests for covid, and Figure 1b really drives home the high ra…

Yep. In fact, false negatives of current test are a function of time since the onset of symptoms:

Day 1? ~7% false negative Day 10? 40% false negative Day 20? 90% false negative

That's really high, and it seems anecdotally likely that a majority of tests have been administered to people who are 7-10 days or more post-symptom-onset.

Here's the tweet discussing this: https://twitter.com/c0nc0rdance/status/1248094573928251398/

And here's the paper: https://t.co/aSdFeLzopH?amp=1

Re: Covid may be far more widespread than we thought

#32

Post by vondur »

vanniv wrote: post #23
vondur wrote: post #11

I was pretty sick in late February, and ended up in the urgent care at my local Kaiser. It was packed at the time too. Seemed like everyone was sick with the flu.

I was terribly sick in early February, in CA. I went to my urgent care multiple times as I got worse. The doctor tested me for influenza, but told me that he was seeing hundreds of patients, all day every day, with "an unusual flu" where they were mildly sick for a few days, recover, and then suddenly got much worse with high fevers and chest infections -- and most of those patients were turning up with negative infl…

I've also read that one of the reasons that California has relatively low infection numbers given it's circumstances, may be do to the fact that Covid-19 had been spreading earlier in the year. Many people may have been unknowingly infected, and either have recovered and have immunity, or unfortunately may have died from it.

Re: Covid may be far more widespread than we thought

#33

Post by [deleted] »

etrabroline wrote: post #14
Jordrok wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's still an idiot. He chose to believe that not because of research or statistics or the advice of people with expertise, but because it was convenient. This was at the beginning of March when there had only been 11 deaths. He was making the argument that this is no worse than the normal seasonal flu, because he was loathe to take any drastic preventative action that might disrupt his precious stock market. Well, h…

I'm loathe to defend the current US president, but almost no Western country took this seriously until the last possible minute. There is clearly a deeper ideological issue infecting the entire West.

[deleted]

Re: Covid may be far more widespread than we thought

#34

Post by vanniv »

vondur wrote: post #32
vanniv wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was terribly sick in early February, in CA. I went to my urgent care multiple times as I got worse. The doctor tested me for influenza, but told me that he was seeing hundreds of patients, all day every day, with "an unusual flu" where they were mildly sick for a few days, recover, and then suddenly got much worse with high fevers and chest infections -- and most of those patients were turning up with negative infl…

I've also read that one of the reasons that California has relatively low infection numbers given it's circumstances, may be do to the fact that Covid-19 had been spreading earlier in the year. Many people may have been unknowingly infected, and either have recovered and have immunity, or unfortunately may have died from it.

It may be so.

Although, it seems apparent that there were not millions of cases before we started looking, given that hospitals here were not overrun like they were in New York.

About a month ago, I did some poking around with the CDC FluView statistics (in-season estimates of influenza and all-cause-pneumonia deaths)

The conclusion that I came to was an upper bound on undetected COVID cases before 3/1 of 300k.

More than that, and the hospitalization and death rates could not have hidden in the flu and pneumonia data.

300k extra recovered cases, even if they were all in CA, would not be material in terms of new immunity.

Unless the Asia-origin strain we had was much less dangerous than the European-origin strain in NY (in which case more cases might hide in the data) -- but that is a pretty tall set of assumptions.

Re: Covid may be far more widespread than we thought

#35

Post by Gibbon1 »

vanniv wrote: post #34
vondur wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've also read that one of the reasons that California has relatively low infection numbers given it's circumstances, may be do to the fact that Covid-19 had been spreading earlier in the year. Many people may have been unknowingly infected, and either have recovered and have immunity, or unfortunately may have died from it.

It may be so. Although, it seems apparent that there were not millions of cases before we started looking, given that hospitals here were not overrun like they were in New York. About a month ago, I did some poking around with the CDC FluView statistics (in-season estimates of influenza and all-cause-pneumonia deaths) The conclusion that I came to was an upper bound on undetected COVID cases before 3/1 of 300k. More…

My take the rate of serious illness and death due to COVID19 is a bounded parameter with a linear range. The infection rate is currently unbounded and logarithmic.

Ain't got much wiggle room to work with there. You have to pretend the morbidity rate is 20 to 50 times lower than the known lower bound (3-5%). So doesn't square.

Re: Covid may be far more widespread than we thought

#36

Post by woodandsteel »

logjammin wrote: post #24

This is a problem of insufficient data. We don't have a denominator, so there's no way to tell if it's more widespread than we thought. In fact there's no good way to tell how widespread it is at all. We have numerators: number of people sick enough to show to up to an ER, or number dead, or whatever, take your pick. But in every fraction we might want, we lack a denominator: total number of people infected. There's…

My understanding is this hasn't been done yet because we still don't have enough tests for all the people who have symptoms or might have the disease due to circumstances. But the number of available tests is going up very rapidly, so maybe pretty soon we will be able to do that sort of study.

Of course, our stable genius president has been insisting for months that there is no shortage of tests.

By the way, another way to go at this question is to test for antibodies, and that is also being developed very rapidly.

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