There is a study going round arguing that most people are already infected with the new coronavirus, and that the CFR is thus very, very low.
The implication is that “hotspots” (e.g. Wuhan, Lombardy, NYC) were figments of our collective imagination.
Or, perhaps more plausibly, it’s just a cope.
thus far, over 100 IgG and IgM test results show no asymptomatic positives in bay area. the only positives we’ve seen are known c19 infections (the test DOES work). broad geography and age bands. new tests being validated and start going out today.
— david friedberg (@friedberg) March 26, 2020
Please keep off topic posts to the current Open Thread.
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Even Neil Ferguson has backtracked and forecast less than 20k deaths, those deaths being people who would die in that year anyway, so basically a bad flu season.
Don’t know why Italy should be seen as the benchmark instead of the clear anomaly it is.
Congratulations to Sweden and the Netherlands, they have taken the correct path.
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/03/people-with-mild-or-no-symptoms-could-be-spreading-covid-19/
There are more asymptomatic than there are symptomatic.
That reminds me of “The Walking Dead” franchise – this is where they got this idea from. I suppose they could test it by re-opening New York city now. I’m all for it!
We’ll see soon enough. Britain has fewer ICUs and about the same number of ventilators as Italy.
https://twitter.com/ProfMartinJBull/status/1241431517915684864
https://twitter.com/neil_ferguson/status/1243294815200124928
He hasn’t backtracked at all, that claim is disinformation by America’s dumb right-wing media which are agitating for an end to shutdown measures.
The theory that millions got COVID-19 but recovered showing no symptoms because the infection rate is so low, seems to have the following flaw:
Assume the number of people who get pneumonia to be 0.01% (let alone who die from it even despite hospitalization).
If a 1,000,000 got infected then there should have been around 100 pneumonia cases. In Wuhan, doctors were alerted to a novel virus within around a dozen cases which were not responding to standard anti-virals and negative for known infections. It would be strange if 100 cases of a strange pneumonia (which has distinctive spread in the lungs) was not picked up, especially in advanced countries and especially when it was know that COVID-19 was around since early Jan with the WHO alerting all its member nations.
I agree that random sampling should begin (have begun) to get a picture of what’s happening with a population, and divide into:
A) positive COVID-19 cases (through swabs) – meaning infected/infectious
B) positive antibodies (through blood) – meaning potential immunity
C) Neither – potentially infect-able
(Those who are +ve COVID-19 and antibodies are presumably at the tail end of their infection and can be considered A)
In general, apart from natural mortality rate (how many die within a given population assuming full capacity – which is the raging debate), Hospitalization rates and capacity are very important to consider. If the capacity within a certain cluster can handle the surge of hospitalizations, and treat people to the full capacity, there isn’t a medical emergency requiring triaging. In hotspots like Wuhan, Qom, Lombardy, Madrid that was the issue. (In Iran, the bottleneck is not beds or doctors but equipment).
So even if natural mortality rate is 0% (everyone who needs treatment is 100% cured), once treatment is a bottleneck people will be negatively impacted.
I don’t read or watch American media, Ferguson has backtracked, he is just claiming he hasn’t backtracked because the government has implemented some measures that we were going to mostly implement anyway. So he can claim to have been right even though he accepts that his forecast was out by a multiple of twenty five. Oxford is right, Imperial is wrong.
Survival rate on a ventilator 3-5%.
“The implication is that “hotspots” (e.g. Wuhan, Lombardy, NYC) were figments of our collective imagination.”
i don’t think anybody is claiming that hotspots aren’t real. of course they’re real. only that they are the exception, can be locked down and deal with, and that we don’t have to shut down a nation of over 300 million people because a few thousands asshole Democrats in Trump hating, America hating New York City are gonna die. i think we should let them die, by the way. the more Cuomo and DeBlasio run their mouths, the stronger i feel about it.
they’re also not serious about it, despite how much they talk about it being serious. due to geography, NYC is easy to isolate. but they’re not doing that. until i see 20,000 National Guard guys surrounding NYC, and nobody can leave on a bridge or a tunnel, and all flights out of Laguardia and JFK are grounded, i’ll continue to not believe they are serious at all. send the Coast Guard to stop even their dumb little boats.
they’re also stupid, endlessly annoying shitheads who lord their intelligence and wealth over the rest of the country with open contempt, but suddenly they can’t even make their own ventilators or masks or medicine? i thought NYC was the most important city in the country? turns out, they produce nothing of value whatsoever. even with all their asshole billionaire Democrat citizens. what’s 50 billion dollar scumbag Michael Bloomberg doing? i thought he wanted to be President, leader of the country? he can’t be bothered to donate one dollar to help anybody, actually. even pro athletes are making him look bad now, and that’s hard to do.
“The theory that millions got COVID-19 but recovered showing no symptoms because the infection rate is so low, seems to have the following flaw”
i don’t think there’s a big flaw here. millions have got it with minor symptoms or no symptoms at all. their immune systems resisted it and they were just carriers for it. that’s for certain. the main debate is how many millions. not that there were millions. there’s millions more to go, just like with the flu, and a few thousand more deaths of old people who already had other complicating conditions.
according to what i’m reading the virus multiplies in the throat, but damages you if it gets into the lungs and can take hold. so it can hang out in your throat for a while, while you spread it to other people, and you won’t be symptomatic. in a similar way to pneumonia bacteria or herpes viruses hanging out in your lungs or nerves without being able to activate. but like a rhinovirus, your body can eliminate this coronavirus so eventually the asymptomatic people aren’t even carriers.
red “Make American Great Again” Trump face masks when?
then again, you won’t get many Americans to wear face masks outside of a big metro city, so i don’t think that approach will work.
would be interesting to see people reject them just because they said MAGA on them though. kind of like how suddenly Democrats don’t want free IDs to vote.
“Want free money? Yes!”
“Want free college? Yes!”
“Want free drugs? Yes!”
“Want a free, government issued ID that you’re required to produce so you can vote?”
“Hell no.”
I totally agree that we should completely lock down New York and other hotspots, isolate anyone who wants to leave them for 14 days, etc. And I also agree that the total lack of will to do this even among the more Corona-cautious Democrats shows they really don’t care any about the disease any more than Trump, and that it’s all a political charade.
But you presented a false dichotomy: EITHER we quarantine New York, OR we “shut down the nation of 300 million people.” In reality, any nation with a modicum of sense would be doing both regional lockdowns AND social distancing. There are cases in all 50 states, and since it is hard to believe that literally every case can be identified and tracked before it spreads to others, isolation is the only way to stop coronavirus from becoming endemic. That should be in addition to preventing movement out of hotspots like NY where the virus is so prevalent that even social distancing is not capable of halting the spread (because e.g. even essentials like trips to the grocery store are enough to cause continuous transmission in those areas.)
China really did serve as a shining role model for the world in this regard. The fact that they reacted so much better despite a total lack of time to prepare is a massive and crushing indictment of “liberal democracies” everywhere (not just Trump).
It beggars belief that someone can be so stupid as to think a virus that has already infected 80% of the population is only now manifesting exponential growth in the number of confirmed cases and deaths, and that this exponential growth is localized primarily to certain urban foci. I used to laugh at leftist drones for being dipshits who actually believe schmaltz like “diversity is our strength” but SARS-2 is showing me that a huge fraction of the right is no different, and will bend to any narrative so long as the narrative is propagated by its authority figures. If Clinton was in office and doing the same thing Trump is currently doing these same clowns would be decrying the existential threat of coronavirus. How depressing to live among this cattle.
What about the large scale randomized testing in Iceland?
https://nordiclifescience.org/covid-19-first-results-of-the-voluntary-screening-on-iceland/
Could the mortality rate actually be 0.1%?
Where did you get that? What I read previously was that maybe half of those in ICUs died with Covid-19, or rather fewer. This is where the idea that overwhelmed hospitals will lead to a doubling or tripling of mortality rates came from. And it was asserted that the most common treatment for the most serious cases was ventilators.
It’s not harmless to children either. Of course you need a large numbers of infections for one such case.
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/03/22/us/georgia-coronavirus-girl-hospitalized/index.html
Precisely. The known hot spots all have older people in close social proximity, large circulation of people, and cold dry air in the last 3 months. That’s true about Wuhan, Lombardy and NY. The victims are in thousands or could reach hundreds of thousands.
It is tragic, but let’s establish a historical scale. On a historical scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is a regular flu season and 10 is the 14th century Black Death plague, this is between 2 and 4. Noticeable, but not particularly significant.
I also think there is a major problem with testing that many take as manna from heaven. There are timing, accuracy and severity issues with the current testing methods. Yet, even this imperfect non-random testing shows a relatively small number of positives, mostly in single digits. People keep on projecting into the future that the numbers could ‘explode’, that this will be a true pandemic. None of the current data justifies that yet. And there is a seasonal effect, as warmer and more humid weather comes it is unlikely that it would be worse than it is today. (There are only 18 victims in Texas.)
So why the doom? The corona virus – more like a social meme – came at the right time: the world has been in a state of suspended tension for too long. The economic contradictions became too big, the social tensions too sharp. Our ancestors resolved this by going to war or had an internal revolution. The visible urge to go to war by the unhinged liberal elites in the last few years was a signal that they have reached the end of the road. Anything from Syria to Russia and China was tried and it failed. They were constrained by the circumstances and the fatal flaw that one can’t have a war without a willingness to die among your soldiers.
So corona it is, less of a pandemic than a 21st century version of a regular cleansing of societies. Let’s see how it goes.
Report of the WHO-China Joint Mission on Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pg.12
https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/who-china-joint-mission-on-covid-19-final-report.pdf
Being in ICU itself is not equal being hooked on ventilator. In one recent Chinese patient cohort study 97% people on ventilators died:
https://twitter.com/AbraarKaran/status/1238284994117881857
Ban everyone (including whites – whoever is left there) from leaving that shithile and let nature run its course.
They ran that stupid lunar parade and now they all have the Chinese flu.
This is not something very new of course as it has been observed in China too, but it means that currently asymptomatic infected people will seriously deteriorate only 3-4 weeks from now and those who are dying in droves now in Spain/Italy were infected roughly month ago:
https://twitter.com/DrMattMcCarthy/status/1242945626087841793
The problems of wokeness since the late 90s are the fault of the generation z and younger millenials, the drift left of the Democratic party since the late 2000s is also caused by them, boomers and generation x are what kept US politics relatively sane until the mid-2000s, and the wokeness problem in Hollywood only started when the boomer directors and producers started to retire or handed the creative responsibility to younger millenials, and very bad state of society since the late 2000s or mid 2000s is basically the fault of the under 25, or under 30 population. As late as 1990 more than half of the US population was still against interracial marriage, and until the mid 2000s or even late 2000s, gay marriage was still a fringe issue. The issue of globohomo recieving so much support, and the attendant problems is causes, are their fault.
In fact boomers and maybe gen x, can be credited for the US political scene going to much off the left field until the 2000s. Even somewhat liberal boomers and gen x are still sane compared to the millenials and the zs that came after them, after all, it is not the boomers and gen x that are claiming to have 1000000000 genders.
It’s not harmless to children either.
Of course, neither is the “normal” flu. As of 14 March, according to the CDC, in the US:
You nailed the existential dilemma of those with IQs above 130. They see much farther than the cattle can, both through their own reasoning and by being bright enough to stand on the shoulders of the true intellectual giants. My good-hearted Dad advised me, when I was about 12, to “cooperate with people.” Better advice would have been to regard most people as fools, and blaze your own trail.
and 10 is the 14th century Black Death plague, this is between 2 and 4
I assume your scale is logarithmic, not linear. Just to establish some reference points:
10: The Black Plague is estimated to have killed one-third of the European population. So a “10” today would correspond to 250 million deaths in Europe alone (and likely billions worldwide).
1: A “normal” flu season kills around 400,000 people worldwide, two-thirds of whom are over 65.
2? 1968 flu pandemic (aka Hong Kong Flu, Influenza Spaziale, etc.) killed an estimated 1 million worldwide (yet not one of my contemporaries that I have asked can even remember that it occurred).
(Given the more than doubling of population since 1968)
Level 2? would correspond to 2 million deaths today
Your figures seem very low. According to a study of VA patients in the U.S.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8404197
Even these figures don’t seem all that encouraging. If I’m reading them correctly, if you’re on a ventilator, you have only a 30% chance of living one year, after you leave the hospital. It might be higher for temporary ventilator use for surgery after an accident, but an elderly patient coming off a ventilator for respiratory illness had better make peace with God.
Old data.
I was thinking of a logarithmic scale 1 to 10. My guess today is that it is at most 2 – I went up the range to 4 to account for a possible dramatic finale.
We should adjust for a lot more sensitivity today than in the 14th century, or even in 1968. Plus the increased penetration of bad news – corona got visibility that most plagues could only dream about.
The elites control everything except the actual reality. If corona ends up around 2, they will switch to ‘we are heroes, we prevented a catastrophe‘. Very hard to argue with a hypothetical. Another technique is to use ad hoc individual cases – a sad case of a nurse in NY, or a doctor in Wuhan. Most people are numerically challenged so after a few tear-jerk movies that’s all they will remember.
We have the world that sub-100 IQ people can live in. That’s another reality.
Maybe people are a lot more risk averse now than in 1968, or even 1998? How many plane crashes were there in the developed world in 1968, or even 1998, compared to 2019? Or safe is your standard family car in 1968, compared to 2019, or even compared to the year 2000? And in 1968 the life expectancy in the US was only 71 years old.
Maybe that’s what happens if you indoctrinate them for 20 years in liberal milieu, screw them financially with debt and high asset prices, and scare them by engineering an ultra-competitive work where they have to compete basically with everyone in the world and can be fired for a wrong ‘Like’ on Facebook.
It is simply an adaptation by the young to the environment. You only get so many people who will resist, most will simply adapt and many will go overboard thinking that’s what will get rewarded. And it does get rewarded – by the boomers.
Another technique is to use ad hoc individual cases
How about this?
For some inexplicable reason, the following update from Los Angeles Public Health doesn’t seem to be getting very much publicity:
Louisiana: 2,305 (including 83 deaths)
https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/03/health/us-coronavirus-cases-state-by-state/index.html
The new longevity and health odds automatically lead to people being a lot more risk-averse.
Take the extreme case that we would be immortal. No death, unless you have an accident, somebody kills you, or you catch a ‘corona‘. Imagine the risk-averse behaviour that would lead to. Most people would stay in bed, eat only tested food, and look over their shoulder in paranoia for that sneaky brother-in-law.
Today we are kind of testing this lifestyle, especially for older and weaker people. This is literally a philosophical goldmine.
It definitely does discriminate, they just won’t tell us how and why.
It definitely does discriminate, they just won’t tell us how and why.
The Italians do:
Well the boomers were indoctrinated by the Marxist school back in the 60s, if that is your defense. So who deserves to be democided now? You can even argue that the West was pozzed when the treaty of Westphalia was signed.
In fact the majority, or vast majority of boomers and older gen x like Jerry Seinfeld think all the 1000000000 genders stuff is stupid, but they do not want to be deplatformed by gen z and millenial SJWs so they just shut up.
Wow over a hundred tests…totally insignificant. Were the tests given to people who had flu or pneumonia symptoms the latter part of fall 2019? Most probably not.
Really? How about some clinical data? Who developed these tests? What is the veracity of the test producer? Where are the test results of this test procedure? What is the accuracy of these tests? Where is the rest of the Tweet?
My understanding is these tests were bought from China. There is much concern about the accuracy and sensitivity of test kits from Bioeasy…a Chinese company.
And?…I mean 2×2=4 is also very old data, but that doesn’t make it wrong only because of oldness.
The antibody test should be given to people who had flu and or pneumonia symptoms the latter part of 2019…the test should be given, posthumously, to those who died with those symptoms in the same time period (if possible).
This should be done in an effort to determine when this virus started…not when it was correctly diagnosed.
Agreed but don’t forget all their asshole billionaire Republican citizens. I have been saying for years NYC manufactures nothing of use. Their prominent industry produces financial products, which are just scams to make the wealthy and rich…more so. If they were to be cut off from the important parts of the country they would die very soon…vice versa…not at all.
Ck this establishment BS out:
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/pandemics-can-fast-forward-rise-and-fall-great-powers-136417
Just ignore that clown, he’s off in his own deranged universe somewhere.
Yeah, Louisiana, I noticed too.
Possibly an anomaly, or it also gets cold and dry there in February. Saker had a piece about the ski resorts high incidence, in Austria the Alp resorts are very heavily impacted. Maybe corona is just f…ing with us…
It’s very comforting that Barbara is in charge of public health. It shows that even science will not be immune to the identity mania.
It is also interesting that ‘patient privacy‘ didn’t keep Barbara from making her original statement, she knows which way the dominoes fall…
It was a bit more complex with the boomers. I cut it off with the living, so the guys who signed that Westphalia thing are safe…
Very fitting that main bunch of pioneering herd immunners all got the disease at the same time.
This has been seen on a microscale as well.
I have plotted infections in Wales (too early for deaths). One health board covering the former county of Gwent has more infections than the rest of Wales put together. I am using my own area as a control because of very similar social make up.
The only important difference I have found is a rugby match played by Gwent Dragons against an Italian side from near Venice. The area is also an important race horse breeding centre with its own cource at Chepstow, one nearby at Hereford and significantly one in Cheltenham where a major race meeting took place on 10-13 March. The incubation period of the virus before symptoms show is 14 days (the 5.6 days sometimes quoted is a very technical definition). So tomorrow, 28 March, I expect an uptiick in symptoms.
Plotted logarithmically, all the Welsh counties I have looked at show decelerating rates of growth. The curves are China shaped. Earlier UK measures of encouraging the vulnerable to self quarantine appear to have had an impact. Known infections started about the same time and on the same scale in UK, Spain and Italy. The UK has had far fewer deaths. Did self quarantine for the vulnerable work? Imperial College has imposed an unneccessary disaster on us.
Apologies if I repeat some things I’ve said on James Thompson’s column.
Quickly built herd immunity is the only way we will manage this. Suppression will be a disaster. The 2nd wave will be viscous. We will not have enough people with immunity.
People died at home in 1968, at least in my world. Less drama. Did the flu trigger my grandfather’s heart attack? It’s possible, he had it but he was also clearing snow in February with angina.
Except one pesky tiny detail – at this point there is not known for sure at all if there even exists such thing as effective lasting immunity in people after catching this new virus.
People died at home in 1968, at least in my world. Less drama.
Hypothetically speaking, if (alternative world) there had been less “drama” today, could it have played out the same way?
It mean it is old data that has been superseded by new and more reliable data from Iceland, Italy and the Dismond Princess. I am not really sure why Wuhan, with all its problems, is relevant.
Noticeable that much of the hysteria is driven by lefty atheists terrified by the thought of their own mortality.
3% is a SARS2 figure from Wuhan not a general comment about ventilators. To be exact. 1 patient out of 32.
Please, somebody, lock him up!
No, he did not. Read the report.
Ferguson is still saying the same: 40 mil if 7 bl are infected when no measures are taken and this implies 1.9 mil for US and 0.34 mil for UK.
https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/sph/ide/gida-fellowships/Imperial-College-COVID19-Global-Impact-26-03-2020.pdf
I don´t understand that. Why would mass infection later on be worse than mass infection now? I would guess later on would be even better because of more knowledge about the disease and ways to treat it, more preparation, better and more tests, maybe new drugs or vaccines.
Great so if no measures are taken, a hypothetical situation that won’t and isn’t happening.
He quite clearly said he expects less than 20k, and those will be people who will die anyway.
You are an honorary member of “America’s dumb right-wing.’
Very interesting.
Thanks for sharing.
Prior probablity says there is, although not lasting. That said, old people get progressively fewer colds. Your 5 year old is almost perpetually affected by a cold. 25% of all colds are caused by the 4 coronaviruses out of the more than 200 viruses that cause colds. Immunity does build if only as an amelioration.
Now, we can quarantine the old and ill. So next time round, there are more young and healthy key workers to support them. Without some herd immunity, everyone gets it at teh same time. The system is overwhelmed. Also, as you say, better methodology and preparedness if not better vaccines and drugs.
What is CFR?
Should read… wealthy and powerful…more so.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-west-is-misinterpreting-wuhans-coronavirus-progressand-drawing-the-wrong-lessons-11585074966
Chinese in Wuhan talk of antibodies and immunity.
No, I just don’t want to be someone who manipulates the data regarding a serious global crisis for political purposes.
Imperial drops their numbers again, down to 5700.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/coronavirus-lockdown-is-on-course-to-reduce-total-death-rate-3gn7hfjzk
There were 260 deaths on March 28. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-52077997
That didn’t age well…