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Coronavirus clue? Most cases aboard U.S. aircraft carrier are symptom-free

reuters.com

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Re: Coronavirus clue? Most cases aboard U.S. aircraft carrier are symptom-free

#481

Post by bart_spoon »

henrikschroder wrote: post #141
TylerE wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do we KNOW it's controlled? Asymptomatic people are not, as a rule, tested, so actual infection rates could be massive.

No country except Iceland or South Korea knows how many are infected, everyone else's numbers are horribly wrong. But death numbers and hospitalization numbers don't lie. Sure, different countries are counting deaths differently, making it hard to compare them to each other, but the trajectories don't lie. And if you look at growth trajectories, no country is experiencing uncontrolled exponential growth at this point…

South Korea hasn't done much antibody testing, and they are largely testing people with symptoms. They are doing a lot of it, but they still have a potentially large proportion of infected going under the radar.

Re: Coronavirus clue? Most cases aboard U.S. aircraft carrier are symptom-free

#482

Post by merpnderp »

zephyrnh wrote: post #340
gdubs wrote: post #193

Stanford’s study should give us more info soon. They recently screened a decent sized group in Santa Clara County to get a sense of how widespread it is, using their newly developed finger-prick test which looks for both antigens and antibodies (whether you have it / had it and recovered). Currently the test is being prioritized for frontline healthcare workers while they work on scaling up: https://www.stanforddaily…

It's been 12 days since they tested everyone. My understanding is that the results for serological tests are available right away, so I was expecting them to publish results within a few days. Any idea why they haven't yet?

Probably ended up with the same specificity problem that ruined the German antibody test. It's incredibly hard to test for just a single form of Coronavirus.

Re: Coronavirus clue? Most cases aboard U.S. aircraft carrier are symptom-free

#483

Post by bigbob2 »

cm2187 wrote: post #454
chiefalchemist wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've been on lockdown because approx 1% of the US population has tested positive. That means 99% are not. How can we come out of lockdown when we are effectively still where we started. We're not even close to herd immunity.

Not sure I agree with your numbers but I agree with your point, we are very likely quite far from herd immunity. Which means another 18 months in lockdown if we want to stay well within the current ICU capacity until a vaccine is mass produced. Which means an economic downturn not only worse than 2008 (it will be worse already assuming we leave lockdown in a few weeks), but many times worse. Or we can swallow this th…

> If it is “only” two times more, then we need to have an adult conversation on how many lives are worth saving vs our society going through something akin to the great depression.

Why is it that only two choices ever exist when this argument is presented? Choose either death by virus or death by status quo economy. It seems like a more pleasant alternative would be reshaping our economic systems to be more resilient against such a crisis which will almost certainly occur again in the future. Maybe the current ownership and distribution models and how they relate to globalism aren't compatible with something that is now simply a fact of life.

Re: Coronavirus clue? Most cases aboard U.S. aircraft carrier are symptom-free

#484

Post by mkl »

robryan wrote: post #413
hombre_fatal wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see those facts in: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_testing#Virus_testing... https://ourworldindata.org/covid-testing#testing I'd be wary of handing out superlatives just yet in any case.

In Australia we are testing people with symptoms (recently expanded in most places to hae no additional criteria). Some counties with a bigger outbreak/ lesser lockdowns are going to have more people with symptoms to test. 1.7% positive rate is one of the lowest in the world and combined with high testing suggests we are detecting most symptomatic cases.

NZ is mostly just testing people with symptoms too. That's pretty worrying to me given data like this article's. I think we should also be testing big random samples from the population. We've started testing hundreds of apparently-healthy volunteers, which is a good start: https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/health/coronavirus/12107495...

Re: Coronavirus clue? Most cases aboard U.S. aircraft carrier are symptom-free

#485

Post by mkl »

NamTaf wrote: post #307
TylerE wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do we KNOW it's controlled? Asymptomatic people are not, as a rule, tested, so actual infection rates could be massive.

I don't agree with that. If you look at how many negative results are returned, that is a good indicator of whether you're sufficiently testing. For example, the average here in Australia is that 1.7% of tests yield positive cases. That suggests that you're probably testing enough, especially considering if people are self-selecting to be tested when they think they have symptoms. In that case, you'd expect there to…

> people are self-selecting to be tested when they think they have symptoms. In that case, you'd expect there to be minimal additional asymptomatic cases, or you'd be catching them in the negatives.

How does that follow? The asymptomatic people won't self-select to be tested.

Re: Coronavirus clue? Most cases aboard U.S. aircraft carrier are symptom-free

#486

Post by joncrane »

michaelt wrote: post #398
philwelch wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes and no. He was relieved because he went around the chain of command, which is a universal career-ending move in the military even if you do it for all the right reasons—which he did. Also, although he was relieved of command, he wasn’t “fired” or “canned” or discharged from the Navy. He will undoubtedly go into an early retirement with a full pension at his current rank of Captain. That doesn’t change the fundame…

Do you mean e-mailing your commander's commander is a universal career-ending move in the navy? Or was he discharged on evidence or assumption he leaked to the press himself?

Emailing your commander's commander with a groundbreaking complaint is extremely dangerous to your career, yes.

(And not just in the Navy)

Re: Coronavirus clue? Most cases aboard U.S. aircraft carrier are symptom-free

#488

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

couchand wrote: post #339
kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only recovered plasma donation volunteers are being tested.

Hmm, New York Blood Center says, "Please be aware that we do NOT test for COVID-19. You should contact your health care provider if you want to be tested." [0] Where else should I be looking? [0]: https://www.nybc.org/donate-blood/covid-19-and-blood-donatio...

They aren't testing random people. I know someone who has recovered and is waiting on test results before he is allowed to donate.

Re: Coronavirus clue? Most cases aboard U.S. aircraft carrier are symptom-free

#489

Post by cm2187 »

bigbob2 wrote: post #483
cm2187 wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure I agree with your numbers but I agree with your point, we are very likely quite far from herd immunity. Which means another 18 months in lockdown if we want to stay well within the current ICU capacity until a vaccine is mass produced. Which means an economic downturn not only worse than 2008 (it will be worse already assuming we leave lockdown in a few weeks), but many times worse. Or we can swallow this th…

> If it is “only” two times more, then we need to have an adult conversation on how many lives are worth saving vs our society going through something akin to the great depression. Why is it that only two choices ever exist when this argument is presented? Choose either death by virus or death by status quo economy. It seems like a more pleasant alternative would be reshaping our economic systems to be more resilient…

The ownership and distribution models aren't the problem. The problem is that while everyone is locked up at home, no one consumes, we don't go to restaurants, to malls, we don't do tourism. And in some case we don't produce either, construction is halted, etc. There is almost no economic activity going on.

No economic model works when everyone is effectively on house arrest.

Re: Coronavirus clue? Most cases aboard U.S. aircraft carrier are symptom-free

#490

Post by andrewla »

ImaCake wrote: post #105
andrewla wrote: post #13

There's always the chance that the test itself is not particularly good and just has a high false positive rate. Although it is difficult for a PCR test to produce a match if there is no genetic material present, it may amplify trace signals, depending on the cutoffs chosen.

I looked into this a few weeks ago. The PCR test has an incredibly low false positive rate, below 1%. It is low enough that it is feasible to test a 100,000 people and expect basically zero false positives. The false negative rate is somewhere around 30%. So the real danger with PCR is that you will miss cases. The opposite is true for the antibody tests. The false negative rate is around 10% and the false positive r…

> The PCR test has an incredibly low false positive rate, below 1%.

Do you have a source, offhand? The problem with asserting any sort of false positive rate is that you need to benchmark against a source of truth. What source of truth are we talking about? A second PCR test? Clinical diagnosis?

If we benchmark against the clinical diagnosis, for example, then clearly this is a huge false positive rate -- most of the patients are clinically diagnosed as negative, which is all this article is saying. Benchmarking against a second test doesn't really tell us much if trace signals are being amplified, or if the laboratory is in any way compromised because of the urgency of the testing.

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