Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Covid-19: the harms of exaggerated information and non‐evidence‐based measures

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

341–350 of 462 posts

Re: Covid-19: the harms of exaggerated information and non‐evidence‐based measures

#341

Post by kragen »

headmelted wrote: post #276
rramach wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

John's analysis is cherry picking in many ways. Death rate in Diamond Princess is 1.1% today and 2% is listed as severe. Assuming 50% of severe make it, final fatality rate for the ship may end up closer to 2%. John then adds a 50% discount factor but it is not clear how he picked that number. Also, the 1% of population infected seems to be another number pulled out of a hat. If we are basing our figures based only o…

Why 20%? That also seems wildly optimistic. 80% seems like a more reasonable assumption than 20%. Also - 99.9% of those patients (pulled out of a hat) wouldn't have access to health care because the capacity was already overwhelmed, so the death rate will jump markedly.

Because 712 out of the 3711 passengers and crew were infected, and 713÷3713 ≈ 19.2%. So that gives us some sort of vague idea how much of the population from which the ship was drawn will become infected if exposed.

Re: Covid-19: the harms of exaggerated information and non‐evidence‐based measures

#342

Post by CydeWeys »

listsfrin wrote: post #317
gpderetta wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those people haven't stopped dying. As a comparison, 700 people have been dying every day for covid-19 in Italy. Also deaths are not (yet) evenly distributed but greatly concentated in the north.

You are building the world around your arguments. You have no proof but still talk, talk, talk.

What does that even mean? The world is what it is. Italy is seeing huge increases in background death rates at the moment, owing solely to COVID-19 (while at the same time seeing diminished deaths from things like traffic accidents, though not remotely enough to make up for all the extra COVID-19 deaths).

What is your argument exactly? It's a fact that Italy is running at a higher overall mortality rate owing to COVID-19.

Re: Covid-19: the harms of exaggerated information and non‐evidence‐based measures

#343

Post by kgwgk »

listsfrin wrote: post #231
fbn79 wrote: post #213

"And yet it moves" Galileo Galilei https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_yet_it_moves?wprov=sfla1 . I agree that in many axpects the situation is exagerated, in primis by general panic. But If the Covid is not much worse than flu why in Italy we have military trucks convoy that transport death to southern regions because the wait line for crematory in North is becomed too long?

In normal times Italy has a death rate of 10 deaths/1000 people. Which translates to ~1500 daily for a population of 60 millions. What were they doing previously with the dead?

Covid-19 deaths are not spread out over the country. There are places where people is dying at four times the usual rate.

Re: Covid-19: the harms of exaggerated information and non‐evidence‐based measures

#344

Post by 34679 »

Barrin92 wrote: post #103
defen wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> “If we assume that case fatality rate among individuals infected by SARS-CoV-2 is 0.3% in the general population — a mid-range guess from my Diamond Princess analysis — and that 1% of the U.S. population gets infected (about 3.3 million people), this would translate to about 10,000 deaths.” Why would we use the Diamond Princess CFR instead of China's, or Italy's, or South Korea's? Where does the idea of 1% come fro…

>Why would we use the Diamond Princess CFR instead of China's, or Italy's, or South Korea's? because everyone on the diamond princess was tested. So we know for sure how many cases we are dealing within the sample. ~0.3 and ~0.9% are also not optimistic guesses but the current numbers for Germany and SK. Italy sits at 9%. So the situation is either that Italy is vastly underestimating cases, or Germany and South Kore…

I know this may sound ridiculous, but Kimchi and Sauerkraut? Are any other countries with a high consumption of low pH fermented foods also showing a lower CFR?

Re: Covid-19: the harms of exaggerated information and non‐evidence‐based measures

#345

Post by xerox13ster »

fbn79 wrote: post #213

"And yet it moves" Galileo Galilei https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_yet_it_moves?wprov=sfla1 . I agree that in many axpects the situation is exagerated, in primis by general panic. But If the Covid is not much worse than flu why in Italy we have military trucks convoy that transport death to southern regions because the wait line for crematory in North is becomed too long?

Non-Mobile Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_yet_it_moves

Re: Covid-19: the harms of exaggerated information and non‐evidence‐based measures

#346

Post by Klinky »

usaar333 wrote: post #117
Klinky wrote: post #6

Is this paper basically saying China and Italy's troubles with COVID-19 "ain't no big deal", and that New York and Washington are not struggling? >"Leaving the well-known and highly lethal SARS and MERS coronaviruses aside, other coronaviruses probably have infected millions of people and have killed thousands" This is not cited, and seems like potentially exaggerated non-evidence based information.

> ,New York and Washington are not struggling Completely different worlds. New York is in some serious trouble. No one is going to even remember Washington has an outbreak in a week's time - it's probably already past peak new cases.

Compare cases per million residents and reconsider.

Re: Covid-19: the harms of exaggerated information and non‐evidence‐based measures

#347

Post by seppel »

nopinsight wrote: post #307
Barrin92 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Why would we use the Diamond Princess CFR instead of China's, or Italy's, or South Korea's? because everyone on the diamond princess was tested. So we know for sure how many cases we are dealing within the sample. ~0.3 and ~0.9% are also not optimistic guesses but the current numbers for Germany and SK. Italy sits at 9%. So the situation is either that Italy is vastly underestimating cases, or Germany and South Kore…

0.3% & 0.9% are optimistic. South Korea's naive case fatality rate (CFR) is already 120 deaths/9037 cases = ~1.3% today, gradually going up from ~0.5-0.6% a few weeks ago. Why? People in a functioning healthcare system take time to die and these people were infected during an expansion phase of spread which rapidly increases #cases (denominator). SK's cohort CFR is even higher. More properly, we should use the infect…

>South Korea's naive case fatality rate (CFR) is already 120 deaths/9037 cases

But the denominator in this formula strongly depends on who and how often you test. In other words: You don't know the number of cases.

Obviously, people who are severely affected are tested more often. People with mild or no symptoms might never be tested, even if they want to (I'm not sure about South Korea but for sure this is happening in Germany).

Based on people in the German parliament and the German soccer league, you can currently guestimate that 1% of the population is already infected (1% of the parliament and 1% of the premier league players are infected. I suspect that they are tested more often and even without symptoms. Maybe they have more contact to other people - maybe not).

Yes, this is a wild guess, but much better than taking the confirmed cases which are heavily biased towards people where the infection causes problems.

Re: Covid-19: the harms of exaggerated information and non‐evidence‐based measures

#348

Post by Klinky »

giantDinosaur wrote: post #293
kgwgk wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may not understand what "random sample of the overall population" means if you would expect every single person in the sample to be healthy enough to travel on a cruise. Almost 1% of the population in the US has Alzheimer disease or other dementias, for example.

I noted exactly that in my comment. Yes, not all the population can go on a cruise. No, it's not like it's only the healthiest 20% of the population that can. If I randomly sampled the population I'd expect the majority to be capable of a cruise. What do you think cruises are like?

It's been hitting those in assisted living facilities rather hard, and those people would likely not be able to take a cruise.

Re: Covid-19: the harms of exaggerated information and non‐evidence‐based measures

#349

Post by jjgreen »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #148
hartator wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well deaths in the US only for flu were 50,000 last year. Still 5x less.

Corvid 19 deaths are doubling every 3 days in US and a few other countries. Do the extrapolation.

In 47 days, twice the population of the Earth will be dead.

Re: Covid-19: the harms of exaggerated information and non‐evidence‐based measures

#350

Post by Symmetry »

leereeves wrote: post #253
rsfern wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> together with tracing This is key — these countries were able to avoid lockdown by testing and tracing early, before the case load became unmanageable. In the US, we’ve missed that opportunity

South Korea, with one-sixth the population of the US, peaked at 10,000 cases. We haven't passed that per capita case load - and even if we do, lower population density should make it easier to get the virus under control in the US (except in NYC).

We're still a long way from Korea's testing capability. Mass use of surgical masks in public probably also helps.
Post reply on HN