71–80 of 206 posts
The spike happened after Christmas as New Years.
There are other possible explanations not being factored as well...
People have been home A LOT this past year and are probably in worse shape then ever and some people probably lack more vitamin d then ever before.
The weather is colder in the northern hemisphere now, contributing to low air humidity and benefiting viruses.
So the main complaint is that the US Govt model has 70 million symptomatic-but-undiagnosed cases in the US compared to 23 diagnosed cases and the author claims this is wildly wrong. If those numbers were correct, we'd have diagnosed 23% of cases. Do we really thing we've done much better than that? I'm not certain. I'd be a little surprised if it were over 50%, but that's purely based off intuition. The other point t…
They aren't exact, but the goal with this type of research isn't perfect accuracy, that is impossible, it's better information than we currently have. The prevalence number that you get from a sero survey is hugely important to accurately estimating the effectiveness of medical tests. However, getting that data into a model of test accuracy isn't necessarily easy. [3]
This is an example of a COVID sero survey from Santa Clara County last April [4]. Over two days they collected around 3500 samples over two days. There results summary is basically this:
The raw prevalence of antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 in our sample was 1.5%. Weighted for population demographics of Santa Clara County, the prevalence was 2.8%. Using those prevalence numbers, the unweighted estimate of case numbers was 23,000. Using the weighted prevalence number, the estimate was 54,000. In early April, there were approximately 1,000 confirmed cases in Santa Clara County.
From my epidemiologist friends, they think 50% diagnosed cases is if anything a massive overestimate of the diagnostic rate and something like 1 in 4 diagnosed cases is probably accurate (this is hearsay that I can't cite from people in the field). The problem is that the 23,000-54,000 people who 'had' (air quotes) COVID last April may or may not be immune at this point. The numbers may be high or low ...either way they are BAD
Not even getting into what this means about vaccine policy...just talking about what the data and numbers are here. I'm still trying to process what the original post means/is trying to say honestly.
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/geog...
[1] https://www.who.int/immunization/monitoring_surveillance/bur...
[2] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/seropre...
[3] https://academic.oup.com/aje/article/190/1/109/5893084?login...
[4] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.14.20062463v...
Disclaimer: I'm Irish, working in tech but my hobby that gets me more of a social life is involvement with an Irish political party. The new variant accounted for 10-25% of these new cases over the period of that spike. The spike happened two weeks after Christmas when lock-down restrictions were lifted, as planned in October, so people could have a respite after 9 months of all this. Did the government misjudge just…
Also Irish. +1 on your assessment here. The virulent strain narrative was peddled by the Irish government who went against medical advice and tried to deflect blame. The evidence doesn’t support the narrative. I think the COVID-fatigue angle is quite interesting though. As critical as I am of the government they were under a lot of pressure from the populous to provide some sort of respite.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Really quck edit: this is probably the most controversial comment that I have posted here. However, without a proper survey I am still not convinced that someone will associate "the Irish problem" with the violence there. Take the discussion below with a grain of salt and I hope that you, assuming that you are in the west coast or Atlantic coast, consider if someone (a random person) in the Midwest will know this. To…
Surely the bombs in London and Manchester were international news at the time, at least throughout the Western world? Next you'll tell me the average American is unaware of the 7 July bombs on the London Underground, the ETA bombs in Spain, Breivik in Norway or the sarin gas attacks in Tokyo.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Potatoes, a new world food, were a monoculture in Ireland at the time. These days there are a huge number of potato varieties grown, so a devastating potato blight seems unlikely to occur again.
The Russet Burbank potato is 70% of the US market. A blight of this cultivar would be devastating .
Assuming all it takes is a strict 3 week shutdown, why can’t we have that? Or is the assumption wrong? Why weren’t we able to produce enough stock for 3 weeks of total halt?
Somehow it's easier to do in a police state like China. Or maybe a country where there's still a high degree of solidarity (don't quote me, I'm not an expert on exactly why) like New Zealand.
When I read the headline I thought this article might be about domestic terrorism in the US. When I clicked on the article I saw it it was in fact about COVID-19. This is how I test my assumptions.
In Bangladesh, a well-regarded study found that 45% of people in Dhaka, one of the most densely populated regions in the world, had antibodies. This study was conducted between April 18 and July 5. I'm sure the number is much higher now. And most people around me seem to agree with this- our total deaths so far is 1/50 of USA, despite having 1/2 population. Even if we multiply our total deaths by 5 to account for maybe government cover-up, our death rate/infection rate still seems too low. Widespread immunity appears to be the only explanation for this disparity.
[1] https://bdnews24.com/bangladesh/2020/10/12/45-percent-of-dha...
Nice article, but it's flawed because it doesn't mention the cause of the spike is partly the backlog in testing over Christmas. Ireland have recently cleared that backlog, which contributed to the spike.
A backlog in testing? If you are gonna take more than like two days to process a test, why are you even testing?
This is really poorly reasoned. To take a couple examples: > Using data from flu monitoring programs in prior years, the CDC models project that 70 MILLION Americans have already gotten sick with symptomatic Covid, but decided to just write it off as a bad cold and never got tested. I am not making this up. Why is this hard to believe? Covid testing, especially depending on where you live, can be difficult to obtain.…
> Why is this hard to believe?
I don't agree with the article more broadly, but it does make the point that 70 million prior infections isn't consistent with hospitalization numbers over the summer vs now. The only way I can reconcile those numbers is by adding two assumptions: first, that severity depends on initial viral dose; second, various social and weather patterns associated with summer drive lower initial viral doses. I don't think these are implausible assumptions--in fact, I'd guess they're true--but I would need significantly more evidence to make me think they account for many tens of millions of missed COVID cases.