Estimating unobserved SARS-CoV-2 infections in the United States • Hacker News Board

Re: Estimating unobserved SARS-CoV-2 infections in the United States

#71

Post by dm319 » Mon, Aug 24, 2020, 6:21 AM UTC

lettergram wrote: post #37

It seems cases and pandemic related deaths are likely dramatically under reported and detected: https://austingwalters.com/u-s-covid19-less-tests-more-death... Real deaths seem to be closer to 250-300k at this point (whereas officially it’s 170k-180k). Also testing is down for those curious... about 25% down from a month ago. edit : added “pandemic related deaths” - not all deaths are necessarily covid, but could be…

You would expect those deaths to show a signal in the all-cause, excess mortality. When I last checked, somehow, US still had lower excess mortality than the UK per capita. Although numbers are very low in the UK, whereas they are still pretty high in the US.

Re: Estimating unobserved SARS-CoV-2 infections in the United States

#72

Post by rurban » Wed, Aug 26, 2020, 8:45 PM UTC

ouid wrote: post #65

fullshark wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not 2000 cases, 200 cases (1 / 0.53%). If it were 2000 cases then 40 million new yorkers got COVID (which is larger than the population of NYC). Back of the envelope based on this * https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/COVID19/ * https://science.sciencemag.org/content/368/6498/eabd4246 * https://worldpopulationreview.com/us-cities/new-york-city-ny... -> about half of NYC has been infected.

you have completely missed the point. You cannot compare the number of current deaths with the number of current infections without taking into consideration the rate at which the virus is spreading. At the beginning, the rate at which the number of deaths was growing was 26% per day, or doubling approximately every 3 days. This means that in the two weeks that it takes for the average person that is going to die of…

I don't know where you get your numbers from, but they are off by a huge factor. The worldwide IFR is around 0.3% (stable for months), the CFR is multiplied by factor 10.

Korea's CFR is 2.3%, the IFR 0.2%. Some special countries which could not protect the elderly have much higher IFR's of 1 - 1.5%. Remember, the IFR is 10% for over 80 years and neglectable for everybody under 50.

So far there's no evidence on different strains, but lot of evidence of different policies leading to the differences. Esp. for Belgium, Spain, Italy, US and Brazil to name the worst.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.23.20160895v...

Re: Estimating unobserved SARS-CoV-2 infections in the United States

#73

Post by rurban » Wed, Aug 26, 2020, 8:49 PM UTC

throwawaysea wrote: post #30

nxpnsv wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Get an IgG antibody test if you want to know, should still be visible there

It isn’t a fully reliable test though. There are both false positives and false negatives.

The antibody test has a failure rate of 10%, the PCR test a failure rate of In civilized countries the PCR test is free for critical cases (like travelling abroad or in contact with a positive), or 60 EUR if not.