Coronavirus

[AlanSubie4Life]

Thought of the day:

One thing we should realize is that the absolute worse-case scenario of Coronavirus is a known (ie we know fairly well what it would look like if every single person got infected).

But, the absolute worse-case of shutting down is an unknown.
Team-FEAR has not done the mental homework of exploring that unknown in any deliberate or intellectually honest way. Prove me wrong.

It's certainly an interesting experiment. It looks like they have many months to go, but maybe there will be enough of a dropoff over the summer that they can test their way to a different strategy.

Last time I checked South Korea and Germany numbers mortality rate was 3-6x higher than influenza.

You need to distinguish the total mortality from the rate. If you'd like to post some data you can. I've posted the swine flu data links here previously.

Anyway, we truly do not know COVID-19' IFR as we are just starting large scale serology testing to get good estimate on cases.

It seems quite clear it's above 0.7% in most cases. I think it will likely end up above 1% for most populations (it will depend on the population of course, and the portions of the population infected). But anywhere in this range is highly problematic.

~7.5 otherwise healthy people, between 30-50, out of 1000 will die of COVID-19? That is a wide and unusual age range group. Where do you get this data from?

These numbers were incorrect - I've corrected them, using the Spain serology data. It's 0.1% or so between 30 and 59. No, not a huge impact on lifespan - the massive mortality at the upper end likely has a larger effect as that's where ~90% of the deaths are.


I think everyone here wants to open up the country ASAP. I certainly do - no one knows what the consequences are of continued restrictions. But we're extremely rich, and we should be able to get our testing & tracing up rapidly to deal with this problem. We don't have to choose between Sweden's approach or similar and the current restrictions.

 

[GFernandes]

It's certainly an interesting experiment. It looks like they have many months to go, but maybe there will be enough of a dropoff over the summer that they can test their way to a different strategy.




You need to distinguish the total mortality from the rate. If you'd like to post some data you can. I've posted the swine flu data links here previously.



It seems quite clear it's above 0.7% in most cases. I think it will likely end up above 1% for most populations (it will depend on the population of course, and the portions of the population infected). But anywhere in this range is highly problematic.



These numbers were incorrect - I've corrected them, using the Spain serology data. It's 0.1% or so between 30 and 59. No, not a huge impact on lifespan - the massive mortality at the upper end likely has a larger effect as that's where ~90% of the deaths are.


I think everyone here wants to open up the country ASAP. I certainly do - no one knows what the consequences are of continued restrictions. But we're extremely rich, and we should be able to get our testing & tracing up rapidly to deal with this problem. We don't have to choose between Sweden's approach or similar and the current restrictions.

Bottom Right :
IFR under 60: 0,052%
IFR under 70: 0,122%
Country-wide: 0,7%

There's a mistake in assuming Influenza is 0,1% overall. influenza is 0,1% globally and throughout a long period of time. Bad outbreaks of influenza are not 0,1% as I showed before, we have years in Italy between 0,3%-0,7% depending on how many deaths you attribute to influenza, and we all know how we are attributing deaths to CV19... Therefore the only way to measure the burden without all this noise is and has always been in a century of epidemology to see total mortality #s

 

[AlanSubie4Life]

Bottom Right :
IFR under 60: 0,052%
IFR under 70: 0,122%

Yes, so? That is completely consistent with my 0.073% in a limited age bracket of 30-59.

There's a mistake in assuming Influenza is 0,1% overall. influenza is 0,1% globally and throughout a long period of time. Bad outbreaks of influenza are not 0,1% as I showed before, we have years in Italy between 0,3%-0,7% depending on how many deaths you attribute to influenza, and we all know how we are attributing deaths to CV19... Therefore the only way to measure the burden without all this noise is and has always been in a century of epidemology to see total mortality #s

I'm not sure what your point is. It looks quite possible that CV19 will be "globally and throughout a long period of time" at close to 1%.

Feel free to post the data showing a 0.3%-0.7% mortality (IFR, not CFR!) for an influenza outbreak in the last 20 years. That's going to be an estimated number from a governmental disease tracking agency (like the CDC). I think in the 50's or 60's there was a bad flu - not sure what it ended up being though. Feel free to use whatever the worst one you can find is (other than the "1917" (aka 1918) flu pandemic).

For my specific example, a very mild flu (swine flu) ended up having a mortality rate of 0.02%, and infected around 1 billion people. Unfortunately unlike most flus, it disproportionately caused problems in the young, which is why there was so much initial concern.

BAD influenza can be really really bad - no one disputes that. We just have not had a really really bad one for a while (since 1918, or 1917 as Trump likes to say).

 

[azaz]

Greed is killer

Stephanie M. Lee on Twitter

 

[GFernandes]

Yes, so? That is completely consistent with my 0.073% in a limited age bracket of 30-59.



I'm not sure what your point is. It looks quite possible that CV19 will be "globally and throughout a long period of time" at close to 1%.

Feel free to post the data showing a 0.3%-0.7% mortality (IFR, not CFR!) for an influenza outbreak in the last 20 years. That's going to be an estimated number from a governmental disease tracking agency (like the CDC). I think in the 50's or 60's there was a bad flu - not sure what it ended up being though.

For my specific example, a very mild flu (swine flu) ended up having a mortality rate of 0.02%, and infected around 1 billion people. Unfortunately unlike most flus, it disproportionately caused problems in the young, which is why there was so much initial concern.

BAD influenza can be really really bad - no one disputes that. We just have not had a really really bad one for a while (since 1918, or 1917 as Trump likes to say).

I've posted it before but usually my posts are ignored with a "funny" or "disagree" rating, when I'm simply providing links and data:
Italy:
Investigating the impact of influenza on excess mortality in all ages in Italy during recent seasons (2013/14–2016/17 seasons) - ScienceDirect - With Euromomo data.
2016/2017: 0,4-0,7%
2014/2015: 0,3-0,6%

 

[Papafox]

Hawaii Update
Source: State of Hawaii
Source: Hawaii could face civil unrest

* For the second time this week, Hawaii reported no new cases statewide
* Other days this week for new cases were in the single digits, typically four or less
* All islands with exception of Oahu and Maui are now apparently clear of the virus
* Oahu still has about 2 dozen active cases while Maui has a smaller number
* Communications are terrible because mayors of islands and the governor are both offering guidance that sometimes conflicts
* On Oahu, residents believe the government restrictions are now unreasonable and rejecting them. I have seen two birthday parties in the past week with 30 attendees
* Kauai just had its beaches opened even though it has been COVID free for a couple weeks now
* Beaches are closed for sunning on other islands, even though the science indicates beaches in hot sun are one of the safest locations, as long as social distancing is maintained
* Shopping malls were opened last week by governor and then immediately closed on Maui and Oahu by the mayors
* Shopping malls opened on Oahu and Maui this week and FINALLY people with non-emergency conditions can start seeing their doctors again.but the relatively safe outdoor activity known as going to the beach remains forbidden
* Barbers and salons should be opened next week, giving cancer sufferers just one week advantage over pedicure customers on the reopening
* The governor today just extended the stay at home (called safer at home) and quarantine rules through the end of June
* Major General Kenneth O'Hara (state director of emergency management) says rioting and civil unrest is feared unless the state speeds up reopening of the economy
* Tourism is essential and sometime this summer it will open up and if COVID19 has been wiped out in the islands it will be reintroduced at that time

 

[TespaceX]

I think everyone here wants to open up the country ASAP. I certainly do - no one knows what the consequences are of continued restrictions. But we're extremely rich, and we should be able to get our testing & tracing up rapidly to deal with this problem. We don't have to choose between Sweden's approach or similar and the current restrictions.

“Should” is the key word. And what will the most effective and accepted tracing program look like in the US? As cases rise with reopening, the few local efforts here and there using a manual, brute force method is going to be quickly overwhelmed and ineffective.

 

[Daniel in SD]

I came back from my moron cave as you guys like to put it just to fact check your fake data.

What I bolded and underlined is just simply fake.

Take a look at the Spain (one of the most affected places as you guys love to say around here ) antibody study, adjusted for age and tell me where you see that ~0,3% of people infected between 30 and 50 die. You missed that by 10x at best.

The total in the age distribution table doesn't match the total deaths in Spain's data. I'm not sure the reason, it could be because age data is not available for all patients.
https://www.mscbs.gob.es/en/profesi...ina/documentos/Actualizacion_106_COVID-19.pdf

Thought of the day:

One thing we should realize is that the absolute worse-case scenario of Coronavirus is a known (ie we know fairly well what it would look like if every single person got infected).

But, the absolute worse-case of shutting down is an unknown.
Team-FEAR has not done the mental homework of exploring that unknown in any deliberate or intellectually honest way. Prove me wrong.

The worst case is about 12 times worse than what Spain has just gone through. To me that seems pretty bad. I like my parents.
It seems like you are on team fear with your panicked response to reasonable precautions. I'm not scared of what will happen if everyone continues to social distance, wear masks, avoid large gatherings, and wear PPE when working in tight quarters.

 

[Robsenga Hay]

.02% dead vs 2.82% (infected+antibody+dead)
Looks like 0.7% mortality rate for their population.

Strictly you would need to use the recovered number rather than the infected number to calculate a mortality rate.

 

[FoverM]

I'd look at the deaths vs. time. Obviously it's lagging, and it is a scaled version of the cases, convolved with the infection-to-death time "impulse response," but I think it gives a better idea of the actual behavior of the epidemic. The impulse response is about 30% of an impulse, followed by a long tail (there's a significant number of people who die very quickly). (There was a paper in the last couple days outlining this - I think it might have been the French modelling paper.) So it does show some of the exponential rise if you plot that, and it's not obfuscated by the undertesting.

My data is from covidtracking.com.

Here's a chart of FL Deaths and Tests:

These are 7-day averages because the data is very noisy (especially daily deaths). Anyway, when you look at the first part, up to around 04/15, there's a nice delay between positives and deaths of around 7-10 days. You think, hey, someone is very sick and appears at the hospital then gets tested and dies 7-10 days later.

Things get screwy after that. Both deaths and tests jump around 05/05. How do you explain that?

 

[A.N. Gineer]

Europe's "opening lockdowns" are intended to still keep the reproduction rate below 1 so there shouldn't be an increase in deaths...
For our Americans readers, Europe's "opening lockdowns" is basically the same as our "lockdown".

For our European readers like this guy...take a calculus course.

There's a huge difference in deaths and death RATES.

So keeping the reproduction RATE (an important word in your own sentence) below 1 still means an INCREASE in deaths (an integral), but a decrease in the death RATE (a differential).

 

[dqd88]

Greed is killer

Stephanie M. Lee on Twitter

Dr. Bhattacharia, who also was involved in the study, responds around the @49:45 mark

 

[Daniel in SD]

For our European readers like this guy...take a calculus course.

There's a huge difference in deaths and death RATES.

So keeping the reproduction RATE (an important word in your own sentence) below 1 still means an INCREASE in deaths (an integral), but a decrease in the death RATE (a differential).

Obviously I meant deaths per day which was the context.
Deaths will always increase until the zombie apocalypse.

 

[Daniel in SD]

Dr. Bhattacharia

For those interested in the sordid history of the "Santa Clara Study"
JetBlue Founder David Neeleman Helped Fund The Stanford Coronavirus Antibody Study (ignore the headline, there's much more disturbing stuff than that)
Many people warned the authors about the flaws before they submitted it and started doing TV appearances promoting their findings.

 

[dqd88]

The worst case is about 12 times worse than what Spain has just gone through. To me that seems pretty bad. I like my parents.
It seems like you are on team fear with your panicked response to reasonable precautions. I'm not scared of what will happen if everyone continues to social distance, wear masks, avoid large gatherings, and wear PPE when working in tight quarters.

You don't seem to understand my point.
Coronavirus is a "known" thing.
Consequences from a lockdown are an "unknown" thing.

The only way to be thorough and create a plan with integrity is to assess the entirety of the consequences of a lockdown and you have not done that.
I wonder why. Seems to be a psychological thing; and I'm not trying to insult anyone. But I'm just trying to analyze why some (most) view it with your paradigm - which is basically you hone in on a possible family member dying and that consumes and fully forms your view on this matter. It's a micro-view. You become fearful and that limits your ability to see holistically all sides of the equation.
I think high-level. I look at the big picture. At the society level. At the future. At all angles. I'm not viewing this from the lens of "I don't want so and so to die". I'm viewing this as "what is the true nature of the threat" AND "the most sensible way to deal with it at a societal level".

Sometimes a known evil is better than and unknown evil. You should be careful. Reminds me of taking out Saddam. He was bad guy but he had things under control; he was a known evil. We justified liberating the Iraqi people from this murderous dictator but we unleased a can of worms that resulted in far more death and destruction. Big mistake.

 

[A.N. Gineer]

My Grandmother (89 years old) was released back to her nursing home Monday having seemingly recovered from COVID, but overnight Tuesday took a bad turn and is now in Hospice. There was a lot of deception from the Nursing home but it's now come to light they are number 2 in my state for deaths as out of 97 residents, 7 have passed away from COVID.

Speaking with her nurse and asking about whether they had PPE available for visitors so I could come see her I got an earful about how of course they have PPE, the fake news has it all wrong. She went on about how all these old folks just needed to be outside and they would have been fine. Heard about how 7 deaths out of 97 residents are "great odds!" and that these old folks had cormorbidities (my grandmother doesn't other than mild dementia) and that they would have died anyways (aren't we all dying?).

I can't imagine where she got these talking points. And I certainly can't imagine why they had a breakout there. Sounds like they were taking it very seriously.

I expect there will be lawsuits.

The virus takes serious whacks at you after you think you have mostly recovered. Happened to me through the entire month of April - it's a barrel of monkeys' worth of fun getting waterboarded by this virus, gasping for oxygen like a fish washed up on a beach.

You can't imagine?

The reason they had a breakout, despite allegedly taking it very seriously, is snowflakes like you. Asymptomatic visitors who want to bust the rules, or simply irresponsibly (there's a pandemic that kills old people and you can be asymptomatic and infect a vulnerable person) presented themselves in an "old folks' home" before a full lockdown.

And a 7-ish percent infection rate in a place like a nursing home is a damned good result (not odds), which is a pat on the back to what the staff and management are doing.

And what makes you so special that you get PPE, yet doctors or nurses have to wear the same mask all day, and wash them and reuse them? If you could get hoarded PPE, get it, cancel your visit, and donate it to a major hospital.

Lawsuit? You should be taking up a collection to mint gold medals for the nursing staff there.

Pretty entitled. Might want to work on that one a bit.

 

[bkp_duke]

Given all the rushed tests on the market, I expect to see more findings like this one:

Coronavirus (COVID-19) Update: FDA Informs Public About Possible Accuracy Concerns with Abbott ID NOW Point-of-Care Test

 

[SageBrush]

I've posted it before but usually my posts are ignored with a "funny" or "disagree" rating, when I'm simply providing links and data:
Italy:
Investigating the impact of influenza on excess mortality in all ages in Italy during recent seasons (2013/14–2016/17 seasons) - ScienceDirect - With Euromomo data.
2016/2017: 0,4-0,7%
2014/2015: 0,3-0,6%

You are being laughed out of the room due to chronic problems with basic reading comprehension compounded by a steadfast desire to compare apples to car tires. Here is the paragraph from your link you should read and understand

Results
We estimated excess deaths of 7,027, 20,259, 15,801 and 24,981 attributable to influenza epidemics in the 2013/14, 2014/15, 2015/16 and 2016/17, respectively, using the Goldstein index. The average annual mortality excess rate per 100,000 ranged from 11.6 to 41.2 with most of the influenza-associated deaths per year registered among the elderly. However children less than 5 years old also reported a relevant influenza attributable excess death rate in the 2014/15 and 2016/17 seasons (1.05/100,000 and 1.54/100,000 respectively).

Covid mortality in Italy is already 52/100k and you are just getting started; and while Covid-19 also skews to the elderly it is not as prominent as influenza.

 

[GFernandes]

You are being laughed out of the room due to chronic problems with basic reading comprehension compounded by a steadfast desire to compare apples to car tires. Here is the paragraph from your link you should read and understand


Covid mortality in Italy is already 52/100k and you are just getting started; and while Covid-19 also skews to the elderly it is not as prominent as influenza.

So I should only read that paragraph? Or i should read the whole paper? As I said, DEPENDING ON HOW MANY DEATHS YOU ASSUME ARE DUE TO INFLUENZA the rates are between 0,3-0,7%. The Goldstein index is the most conservative, giving a rate of 0,3-0,4%, but if you read it further you'll understand that the rate goes up to 0,6-0,7% if you classify more deaths as influenza(influenza like illness). And you also know that we are classifying pretty much everyone that is positive COVID and dies as a COVID death don't you? Or you choose to ignore that?

And once again, even in your paragraph they mention the range: 11.6 (weak season ) - 41.2 ( strong season) USING THE GOLDSTEIN INDEX. Using Influenza like illness ( SAME WAY WE ARE CLASSIFYING COVID DEATHS NOW *AT BEST* ) it goes to 70/100K.

Do you have your apples to apples now? TABLE 2 and TABLE 4

 

[shinytop]

The only way to be thorough and create a plan with integrity is to assess the entirety of the consequences of a lockdown and you have not done that.
I wonder why. Seems to be a psychological thing; and I'm not trying to insult anyone. But I'm just trying to analyze why some (most) view it with your paradigm - which is basically you hone in on a possible family member dying and that consumes and fully forms your view on this matter. It's a micro-view. You become fearful and that limits your ability to see holistically all sides of the equation.
I think high-level. I look at the big picture. At the society level. At the future. At all angles. I'm not viewing this from the lens of "I don't want so and so to die". I'm viewing this as "what is the true nature of the threat" AND "the most sensible way to deal with it at a societal level".

Thinking high level, are you. Thinking high level would be the judgment of society. No society can call itself truly civilized unless it takes care of its most vulnerable members. And when I say vulnerable I am not only talking about the elderly, but also of the young, and the poor. We don't take care of them by opening up the economy too early. They are the ones who have no choice but to go back to work and risk their health and their lives so can get back to normal.

Thinking high level involves determining what sacrifices the least lives, not what will enrich those who who own the businesses. Thinking high level means figuring out how to get them fed while they shelter, how to build the societal base so that those worried about abuse are protected and know how to get help in these times.

Thinking high level is not about how to let the billionaires make more billions, it is about protecting the most lives and the welfare of the most people. That is high level thinking for a civilization worth preserving, not the moronic leadership of our current administration. The high level thinking needs more leadership that we have and more leadership than that demonstrated by one who is looking at a sensible solution rather than a solution that protects the most people.