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In 4 US state prisons, 3,300 inmates test positive, 96% without symptoms

reuters.com

401–410 of 649 posts

Re: In 4 US state prisons, 3,300 inmates test positive, 96% without symptoms

#401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The virus affects young and healthy folks without co-morbidities dramatically less than it does old folks at a nursing home. Based on New York City data, people without co-morbidities account for something like 6% of hospitalizations [1]. Old folks on a cruise ship full of old people, about 20% showed no symptoms. Is it a big stretch to think that scales to prisoners as shown? They're pretty young (only 2.8% of priso…

Wouldn’t prisons disproportionately have poorer health than average for several reasons?

Basic healthcare in prison is free (I believe?), and I reckon the food is comparatively less likely to give you diabetes?

Re: In 4 US state prisons, 3,300 inmates test positive, 96% without symptoms

#402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You say "almost like", but scientific studies rarely sample the population this way because researchers generally don't have access to a list of all residents.

Well, the type of information you're trying to gather is rather unique. Usually we just wait for a virus to run course then test lots of people to see the resulting case counts. But we can't do that here. Normally you just use a control and test group, but that doesn't work for figuring out underlying infection rates. There are some tests trying to sample everyone in a geographic area (SF Mission census block) but th…

I guarantee you that when the data comes out:

* It will also show an undercount of at least an order of magnitude.

* Commenters will still pop up to explain why the results can't be trusted and which further studies are absolutely required before we believe them.

Re: In 4 US state prisons, 3,300 inmates test positive, 96% without symptoms

#403
post #30
post #3

I've been tracking the antibody study results in a spreadsheet, and they are suggesting a 10-20x undercount of cases in the official "confirmed" numbers. You can see the data I've collected here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/16onEUBWIV5IqN1RCvTla...

I did similar calculations, and found the institutions in charge give us very unreliable data. The term "corona case" is very, very, ambiguous and cannot the understood as such without a detailed explanation on how the counting was done. Thanks for sharing. I found the peek in all-case mortality also very interesting, because that way counting is much more unambiguous: dead is dead. They showed a clear diversion from…

Here is for Europe if you are interested. There are charts for excess morality by country, by age, and by year.

https://www.euromomo.eu/

There is a very noticeable spike in the worst hit countries: Italy, Spain, France, Belgium, Netherlands and the UK. The cumulative excess deaths for all Europe in the last two months matches the COVID-19 reported deaths (around 100000).

Re: In 4 US state prisons, 3,300 inmates test positive, 96% without symptoms

#405

96% are without symptoms yet . There was a nursing home in Massachusetts which had 51 out of 98 residents testing positive but asymptomatic in early April. While this sounded encouraging in the sense no one was critically ill because of coronavirus, a few weeks later 19 had died and about 30 more had tested positive. Let’s wait a month until there is a clearer picture about the impact of the virus on a particular pop…

? You're comparing a prison to a nursing home Another data point, ~12k healthy foreign workers in Singapore have tested positive. The city-state has only 12 deaths total (all elderly, not the foreign workers). In Singapore the foreign workers may have already been asymptomatic for weeks. Based on NYC data, LA city data, Stanford's Santa Clara data, Singapore, Danish blood donor data, a picture is emerging that the vi…

1. Most of these cases were diagnosed in the last two weeks

2. Over 5000 (roughly 40%) have been hospitalized https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/health-environment/article/30...

Data from antibody tests can so far be summarized as garbage:

- https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/stephaniemlee/coronavir...

- https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/04/19/fatal-flaw...

I guess the TL;DR of all of this is, this picture you're talking about is a fallacy premised on bad data

Re: In 4 US state prisons, 3,300 inmates test positive, 96% without symptoms

#406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, the type of information you're trying to gather is rather unique. Usually we just wait for a virus to run course then test lots of people to see the resulting case counts. But we can't do that here. Normally you just use a control and test group, but that doesn't work for figuring out underlying infection rates. There are some tests trying to sample everyone in a geographic area (SF Mission census block) but th…

I guarantee you that when the data comes out: * It will also show an undercount of at least an order of magnitude. * Commenters will still pop up to explain why the results can't be trusted and which further studies are absolutely required before we believe them.

I guess we'll see. I don't share your certainty. Although I'd love to be able to go outside sooner.

Also elsewhere in this thread it's mentioned that the Florida and Santa Clara results could be entirely explained by high type II error in the test. The Florida test appeared to have a false positive rate of ~15% when independently validated, which is basically the infection rate they found. In other words, this is a specific form of base rate fallacy where the test accuracy is really low.

Re: In 4 US state prisons, 3,300 inmates test positive, 96% without symptoms

#407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The virus affects young and healthy folks without co-morbidities dramatically less than it does old folks at a nursing home. Based on New York City data, people without co-morbidities account for something like 6% of hospitalizations [1]. Old folks on a cruise ship full of old people, about 20% showed no symptoms. Is it a big stretch to think that scales to prisoners as shown? They're pretty young (only 2.8% of priso…

Over 40% of Americans have comorbidities (hypertension and obesity being most common) so that stat is not particularly useful.

42.4% of Americans are obese: https://www.usnews.com/news/healthiest-communities/articles/...

When you add in all the other things that count as comorbidities here, you're probably looking at like 75%.

Re: In 4 US state prisons, 3,300 inmates test positive, 96% without symptoms

#408
post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m confused about this version of events that some are supporting. In your view, why does the media have a motive to engage in a secret conspiracy to not present any solutions other than an endless shutdown? How would that benefit ‘The media’?

I don't really have enough karma to be able to waste responding, but I'll make an exception for you, since you asked more politely than most. First, there's not much secrecy involved. It isn't a secret at all that, Hollywood, the American mainstream media, and the political left are all on the same side. It's been obvious for 30 years now. What we are currently living through is a left-authoritarian consolidation of…

It's amazing how much the political left is able to get done with the political right controlling the senate and the presidency :)

Re: In 4 US state prisons, 3,300 inmates test positive, 96% without symptoms

#409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> An IFR of even 1% is pretty bad To be clear: it would be the most dangerous general epidemic disease since the advent of vaccination, and by a significant amount. You need to go back to measles and polio to find general population outbreaks that were more lethal.

A very important thing is that % is concentrated among old and people with preexisting health conditions. Not every death is the same - a 80 year old with weak immune system could have lived 5 years longer without corona, but a healthy 20 year-old dying from cytokine storm caused by influenza has lost potentially 60 years of healthy life - the loss is much worse.

Roughly 25% of males in the US 35-44 had hypertension in 2010, and this grows to over 50% by 55-64, an age I don't think anyone would consider especially old: https://www.heart.org/idc/groups/heart-public/@wcm/@sop/@smd...

Basically everyone who dies from this has a preexisting condition, but basically everyone in the US will develop at least one of the big three (hypertension, diabetes, or obesity) at some point.

Re: In 4 US state prisons, 3,300 inmates test positive, 96% without symptoms

#410
post #137

One of the super-interesting things here, is that apparently everyone was in the specific window where they test positive for the virus. This implies the population was recently infected, had not been previously infected, and it spread almost completely within a tight window. This implies a shocking high R(effective) for that population. In 2 weeks we'll have super interesting data one way of the other on the CFR.

A prison is very much like a cruise ship from a viral perspective. We know from the cruise ship data like the Diamond Princess that most people had no symptoms initially, but overtime most people became symptomatic [1]. Of course if we are really lucky and the prison was infected with a naturally attenuated strain we should make use of it [2]. 1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7078829/ 2. https://www.ti…

Prison demographics are very different than cruise ships, so might be interesting if different
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