Coronavirus

[Gregmal]

What if the death rate is the same as the flue (that would be good), but what if it spreads much faster.  What if (hypothetically) everyone was infected at the same time.  Is that a problem?

 

everyone like dalal has been quoting a mortality rate of 3-4% for covid,

 

Don't misquote me.

 

dont have to dipstick.  your hubristic pronouncements are all over this thread

 

LOL quote him? He refuses to commit to anything. He's been caught lying and called out for retroactively editing the substance of his posts. He rushed to judgment based entirely off of emotions and politics inspired hatred as he misinterpreted Twitter quotes as facts and declared victory and rewrote narratives based on misinformation and preconceived biases, that manifested over a couple weeks. Now, as time has passed on real information, real facts have presented themselves, he stands alone and ashamed, hoping only to again revert to not owing anyone anything and disowning the narratives that he shouted from the rooftops but never actually committed to....

[KCLarkin]

I love the stupidity!  the 21% positive antibody test results on NYCers (3000 person sample) is the best DATUM we have on creating the correct denominator of the mortality per infection rate.  what is your problem, Larkin?

 

https://www.statnews.com/2018/09/26/cdc-us-flu-deaths-winter/

 

What is your denominator for those 80,000 regular flu deaths?

 

You make a back-of-the-envelope estimate for COVID IFR and then announce that it is "just like the flu" without having the intellectual curiosity to actually calculate the IFR for "just the flu"?

 

No expert thinks that "the flu" has an IFR anywhere near 0.67%*. The estimates I've seen are around 0.1%. But if you factor in asymptomatic cases, it is likely even lower.

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/past-seasons.html

 

So Covid is at least 7 times more deadly than "just the flu".

 

--

* even if your Covid denominator is right, your numerator is wrong due to the lag between infection and death.

 

[minten]

Why are some of you people so obsessed with being proven right (or: making sure we all know somebody else was wrong)?  It's so painfully obvious none of us were right, not even remotely, and nobody was "less wrong" than anybody else. As data comes in the truth appears to be more and more somewhere in the middle between what we were all saying.  Can't we just accept that and move on by posting interesting articles etc...  I mean, do whatever you want, but it's so stupid.

[KCLarkin]

everyone like dalal has been quoting a mortality rate of 3-4% for covid, which is too high by at least 5X.

 

Dalal, I don't think he is smart enough to know the difference between CFR and IFR. So he might actually believe this B.S.

[Spekulatius]

NYC:  11,267 deaths divided by 21% of 8,000,000 people=mortality rate of 0.67%.  just like the flu.

 

I love the confidence! Even though you are so consistently proven wrong, you still post with gusto! What is the Infection Fatality Rate of the flu? Nobody actually believes it is 0.67%, do they?

 

This comprehensive review shows ~10 deaths per 100,000 H1N1infections:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3809029/

 

So comparing your bogus numbers for CV to these bogus numbers for H1N1, CV is 67 times more deadly than the flu!

 

I love the stupidity!  the 21% positive antibody test results on NYCers (3000 person sample) is the best DATUM we have on creating the correct denominator of the mortality per infection rate.  what is your problem, Larkin?

 

https://www.statnews.com/2018/09/26/cdc-us-flu-deaths-winter/

 

I agree that this is a meaningful study. It’s large enough and reasonably random. There might be a bias in just choosing people outside vs at home but it is likely not a strong one.

0.67% morbidity is ~7x deadlier than the flu though. The flu kills between 10-50k annually and infects ~30M (roughly ) so thats in the 0.1% ballpark. In addition, it’s much more infective.

[clutch]

I love the stupidity!  the 21% positive antibody test results on NYCers (3000 person sample) is the best DATUM we have on creating the correct denominator of the mortality per infection rate.  what is your problem, Larkin?

 

https://www.statnews.com/2018/09/26/cdc-us-flu-deaths-winter/

 

What is your denominator for those 80,000 regular flu deaths?

 

You make a back-of-the-envelope estimate for COVID IFR and then announce that it is "just like the flu" without having the intellectual curiosity to actually calculate the IFR for "just the flu"?

 

No expert thinks that "the flu" has an IFR anywhere near 0.67%*. The estimates I've seen are around 0.1%. But if you factor in asymptomatic cases, it is likely even lower.

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/past-seasons.html

 

So Covid is at least 7 times more deadly than "just the flu".

 

--

* even if your Covid denominator is right, your numerator is wrong due to the lag between infection and death.

 

Either way, COVID-19 seems much less deadly than expected, perhaps an order of magnitude, which is a good thing. Would you agree?

[KCLarkin]

Either way, COVID-19 seems much less deadly than expected, perhaps an order of magnitude, which is a good thing. Would you agree?

 

No, this is horrible!

 

The estimated IFR has been 0.65-1% since at least early March. 0.67%* is devastatingly high. If we want herd immunity (say 70% infected), that would be over 1.5M deaths in the U.S.

[clutch]

Either way, COVID-19 seems much less deadly than expected, perhaps an order of magnitude, which is a good thing. Would you agree?

 

No, this is horrible!

 

The estimated IFR has been 0.65-1% since at least early March. 0.67%* is devastatingly high. If we want herd immunity (say 70% infected), that would be over 1.5M deaths in the U.S.

 

I'd say that's better than 3-4%.

[Cigarbutt]

NYC:  11,267 deaths divided by 21% of 8,000,000 people=mortality rate of 0.67%.  just like the flu.

I love the confidence! Even though you are so consistently proven wrong, you still post with gusto! What is the Infection Fatality Rate of the flu? Nobody actually believes it is 0.67%, do they?

This comprehensive review shows ~10 deaths per 100,000 H1N1infections:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3809029/

So comparing your bogus numbers for CV to these bogus numbers for H1N1, CV is 67 times more deadly than the flu!

I love the stupidity!  the 21% positive antibody test results on NYCers (3000 person sample) is the best DATUM we have on creating the correct denominator of the mortality per infection rate.  what is your problem, Larkin?

https://www.statnews.com/2018/09/26/cdc-us-flu-deaths-winter/

I agree that this is a meaningful study. It’s large enough and reasonably random. There might be a bias in just choosing people outside vs at home but it is likely not a strong one.

0.67% morbidity is ~7x deadlier than the flu though. The flu kills between 10-50k annually and infects ~30M (roughly ) so thats in the 0.1% ballpark. In addition, it’s much more infective.

The inferred image of the invisible part of the iceberg is slowly getting clearer and the visible part of the iceberg is narrowing down to real value even more.

-For NY State, annual death rates of influenza and pneumonia

2014    4702

2015    4881

2016    4513

2017    4517

2018    4749

 

-For NY State, death rate from Covid-19 is now 15 740 and it is reasonable to expect a total between 25 to 30k deaths reached within the next few weeks.

This would tend to support the hypothesis of 6x more deaths with measures in place.

[KCLarkin]

I'd say that's better than 3-4%.

 

Nobody ever had a 3-4% IFR estimate. You are conflating CFR with IFR. The estimated IFR was always around 0.65%.

[ERICOPOLY]

they dipstick, mortality rate is a % of infected, not a % of population.  elementary common sense

 

No,

 

Case fatality rate is a % of known infected.

 

Mortality rate is a % of population.

 

[Dalal.Holdings]

everyone like dalal has been quoting a mortality rate of 3-4% for covid, which is too high by at least 5X.

 

Dalal, I don't think he is smart enough to know the difference between CFR and IFR. So he might actually believe this B.S.

 

Like I said, we leave the “best of the best” of this forum to do what they do best: the blind leading the blind! Often wrong, never in doubt! I do not respond to such individuals any longer on this forum, they earn the consequences of their thinking.

[patience_and_focus]

Remember, the sensitivity and specificity of these antibody tests matters a lot, and NYC is very different from the rest of the country, as the epicenter of the epidemic. There's got to be a lot of false positives in those tests even if 99%, and you can't extrapolate it to the rest of the country.

 

who needs to extrapolate to the rest of the country, for goodness sakes!!!  apples to apples.  NYC is the epicenter of the crisis, and because major media is NYC-centric, the mass hysteria was exported.  why does the governor of michigan go stalinesque?  because she wants to look like she is on top of things like cuomo.  so of course this doesnt have to be extrapolated nationwide, because NYC's experience isn't the nation's experience.  this 20% antibody positive rate makes covid less deadly than the flu.  and if this result doesnt comport with how you want to think, then just call it a bad test.  an inhale some more sand

 

NYC:  11,267 deaths divided by 21% of 8,000,000 people=mortality rate of 0.67%.  just like the flu.

 

WRONG

 

Reported flu mortality is 0.1% (https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2018-2019.html) in 2018-2019 season (~34000 of 35 million died). This number does *NOT* take into account asymptomatic subjects. See my earlier post about it.

 

UK flu study: Many are infected, few are sick

https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2014/03/uk-flu-study-many-are-infected-few-are-sick

 

Original study in the Lancet:

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanres/article/PIIS2213-2600(14)70034-7/fulltext

 

75% of flu cases are asymptomatic, because only those who show symptoms are tested. Which means that if 10000 are reported to have flu after testing and 0.1% of them die (10 patients / 10000), when asymptomatic subjects are taken into account the denominator is closer to 40000 implying deaths of 10 / 40000 = 0.025%.

 

Last time I checked 0.67 / 0.025 = 26X.

 

 

 

[Liberty]

Remember, the sensitivity and specificity of these antibody tests matters a lot, and NYC is very different from the rest of the country, as the epicenter of the epidemic. There's got to be a lot of false positives in those tests even if 99%, and you can't extrapolate it to the rest of the country.

 

who needs to extrapolate to the rest of the country, for goodness sakes!!!  apples to apples.  NYC is the epicenter of the crisis, and because major media is NYC-centric, the mass hysteria was exported.  why does the governor of michigan go stalinesque?  because she wants to look like she is on top of things like cuomo.  so of course this doesnt have to be extrapolated nationwide, because NYC's experience isn't the nation's experience.  this 20% antibody positive rate makes covid less deadly than the flu.  and if this result doesnt comport with how you want to think, then just call it a bad test.  an inhale some more sand

 

As we've seen at the country level, the hardest hit places are just showing other places what their futures will look like if they don't take measures to prevent it. Thankfully, most places took measures and we're starting to see them work.

 

As for your hand waving of the error rate on these tests (which may be lower than 99% accurate, with a disease that is present in low-single digits of the sample, which means that actual false positives may be 50% or more), I think it says more about how you have a conclusion and try to back-fill the details rather than look at the data.

[clutch]

I'd say that's better than 3-4%.

 

Nobody ever had a 3-4% IFR estimate. You are conflating CFR with IFR. The estimated IFR was always around 0.65%.

 

My bad.

 

I'd still take these study results as a good sign than a bad one. I'd rather have fewer people die over the period of this pandemic, even if only by fewer percentages.

[Guest cherzeca]

if you look back at past flu epidemics (and there were 80K deaths in US in 2018), there was more fatalities for children and non-elderly than covid.  so what we did here was panic, based upon an assumed 3-4% mortality rate of those infected, not appreciating the number of infected without symptoms was much greater than assumed, and instituted an unprecedented lock down of our entire economy, when we should have realized based upon early covid evidence that a focus upon elderly was most efficacious.  and then we ignored the elderly largely by not ordering a no-visitation policy until late in the game.

 

we should admit our own deadly ignorance even as most of you kowtow to "experts". shame on all of us.

 

for those who think visions of "1984" (the book) in US are a bit much, here is your precedent.  politicians love power, and the greatest power is to tell you what to do in its most intimate details, all based upon "scientific fact" and the "wisdom of experts".  deblasio wants to have people report distancing violations to a special hot line....ooooh, how Stasi of us, isn't this wonderful!!!

[Cigarbutt]

Dont think this was posted before but this does put some trade offs within perspective.

Avg length of stay once in a nursing home before death was 5 months.

https://www.geripal.org/2010/08/length-of-stay-in-nursing-homes-at-end.html

End of life was pulled forward ~5 months for the vast majority of COVID19 deaths it seems. The economic vs life cost discussion can get ugly but.....

I find this aspect relevant. In my province (beside clutch's Ontario), 80% of CV deaths occur in retirement homes and in 50% of those cases (more frail, chronic care, poor autonomy) life expectancy is similar. However, the "average" statistics here are skewed because a significant number of older people that are transferred to these chronic care institutions after a hospital stay have a poor prognosis and then it represents end of life care. It looks like median survival is somewhat higher even in these specific institutions. Life expectancy in other retirement homes is much higher. Using good methodology about comorbidities, the typical patient admitted for CV in a NY City hospital has about an expected 50% 10-yr survival.

All that to say that about 50% (perhaps slightly more) who die from CV (main disease or multi-organ failure trigger) have a relatively poor quality of life (sick and cognitive impairment) and would have died anyways shortly after. But the loss of life expectancy for the rest is more significant and includes a period of reasonable or good quality of life.

Another concern (based on similar epidemic episodes or the COVID-19 episode that happened elsewhere before), it appears that sub-optimal (to be defined) policies (on top of causing more deaths) cause the mortality curve to shift to younger and 'healthier' (relatively) populations.

[DooDiligence]

if you look back at past flu epidemics (and there were 80K deaths in US in 2018), there was more fatalities for children and non-elderly than covid.  so what we did here was panic, based upon an assumed 3-4% mortality rate of those infected, not appreciating the number of infected without symptoms was much greater than assumed, and instituted an unprecedented lock down of our entire economy, when we should have realized based upon early covid evidence that a focus upon elderly was most efficacious.  and then we ignored the elderly largely by not ordering a no-visitation policy until late in the game.

 

we should admit our own deadly ignorance even as most of you kowtow to "experts". shame on all of us.

 

for those who think visions of "1984" (the book) in US are a bit much, here is your precedent.  politicians love power, and the greatest power is to tell you what to do in its most intimate details, all based upon "scientific fact" and the "wisdom of experts".  deblasio wants to have people report distancing violations to a special hot line....ooooh, how Stasi of us, isn't this wonderful!!!

 

LOL, is this your way of easing into saying you're wrong?

[Guest cherzeca]

@cigarbutt

 

and so how does a nationwide lockdown make sense, if one could use limited resources to at least try to ring fence the elderly?

 

it is all about power of politicians and it should make us all most concerned

[Guest cherzeca]

if you look back at past flu epidemics (and there were 80K deaths in US in 2018), there was more fatalities for children and non-elderly than covid.  so what we did here was panic, based upon an assumed 3-4% mortality rate of those infected, not appreciating the number of infected without symptoms was much greater than assumed, and instituted an unprecedented lock down of our entire economy, when we should have realized based upon early covid evidence that a focus upon elderly was most efficacious.  and then we ignored the elderly largely by not ordering a no-visitation policy until late in the game.

 

we should admit our own deadly ignorance even as most of you kowtow to "experts". shame on all of us.

 

for those who think visions of "1984" (the book) in US are a bit much, here is your precedent.  politicians love power, and the greatest power is to tell you what to do in its most intimate details, all based upon "scientific fact" and the "wisdom of experts".  deblasio wants to have people report distancing violations to a special hot line....ooooh, how Stasi of us, isn't this wonderful!!!

 

LOL, is this your way of easing into saying you're wrong?

 

no?  doo yourself

[KCLarkin]

if you look back at past flu epidemics (and there were 80K deaths in US in 2018), there was more fatalities for children and non-elderly than covid.  so what we did here was panic, based upon an assumed 3-4% mortality rate of those infected, not appreciating the number of infected without symptoms was much greater than assumed, and instituted an unprecedented lock down of our entire economy, when we should have realized based upon early covid evidence that a focus upon elderly was most efficacious.  and then we ignored the elderly largely by not ordering a no-visitation policy until late in the game.

 

Okay, this is the last time I will correct you for a few weeks. The experts prediction of both mild/asymptomatic cases and IFR are accurate. Maybe it is your lack of expertise that is the issue (for example not knowing the difference between IFR and CFR)?

 

The original model presented by the White House estimated 1.5M-2.2M deaths, if there was no mitigation. Guess how many deaths there would be assuming your 0.67% "mortality rate" and an attack rate of 70% (rough estimate of infection rate needed for herd immunity)?

 

328M * 0.7 * .0067 = 1.5M

 

Seems pretty accurate to me. Maybe the experts know more about this pandemic than Cerzeca?

 

 

[clutch]

if you look back at past flu epidemics (and there were 80K deaths in US in 2018), there was more fatalities for children and non-elderly than covid.  so what we did here was panic, based upon an assumed 3-4% mortality rate of those infected, not appreciating the number of infected without symptoms was much greater than assumed, and instituted an unprecedented lock down of our entire economy, when we should have realized based upon early covid evidence that a focus upon elderly was most efficacious.  and then we ignored the elderly largely by not ordering a no-visitation policy until late in the game.

 

Okay, this is the last time I will correct you for a few weeks. The experts prediction of both mild/asymptomatic cases and IFR are accurate. Maybe it is your lack of expertise that is the issue (for example not knowing the difference between IFR and CFR)?

 

The original model presented by the White House estimated 1.5M-2.2M deaths, if there was no mitigation. Guess how many deaths there would be assuming your 0.67% "mortality rate" and an attack rate of 70% (rough estimate of infection rate needed for herd immunity)?

 

328M * 0.7 * .0067 = 1.5M

 

Seems pretty accurate to me. Maybe the experts know more about this pandemic than Cerzeca?

 

Something doesn't seem right though, so help me understand. The same White House model projected that 100,000 and 240,000 would die with the mitigation measures in place. Are they speculating that there will be a vaccine available before the US reaches the attack rate?

 

Another possible explanation -- If you flatten the curve, you might be able to avoid some deaths due to the healthcare system overflow, but I expect that the area under the curve would still be similar (compared to when you have a spike). So are they saying that they would save an order of magnitude of lives by keeping the health care system below the threshold?

 

Part of my problem with these projections is that there is no transparency or explanation whatsoever...

[RichardGibbons]

Richard, there are 800k+ confirmed covid cases in the US.  Some of the population studies that have recently come to light over the past week suggest that 10x or 20x the confirmed number might be carrying antibodies.  If that's actually true (big if), the number of people in the US with antibodies today could be 8 to 16 million.  Now, suppose the number of cases has been doubling every week for the past 3 weeks while we have all been social distancing.  Working the exponential growth backwards, how many people had antibodies on April 2 if there actually are 8m to 16m that have antibodies today?  My rough math is 1 or 2 million in the US?  How is that inconsistent with hundreds of thousands or millions during March?

 

The answer is that we know what it looks like when there are hundreds of thousands of cases--like NYC. If one's going to claim that hundreds of thousands of cases were in the USA with nobody noticing, you'd have to have those cases distributed mostly evenly across the country, which is quite implausible (because of density, how people arrive in the country, what subsequent outbreaks looked like, the low number of healthcare professionals who have got sick with it outside of places with a known outbreaks etc.) I think the back of the napkin math assumes roughly even distribution, and that doesn't seem to be at all how disease transmission actually works.

 

So me, the balance of evidence by far suggests that the antibody tests are questionable (the math saying you can't accurately measure accurately if the false positive rate is at all close to the actual infection rate). But even if it weren't, I think it's quite difficult to extrapolate the results to the rest of the country.

 

(It's also worth noting that Orthopa's argument wasn't simply that there were a bunch of cases that were about to cause an explosion because they were asymptomatic and about to become symptomatic. It was that there were already a bunch of cases that had happened, and it wasn't a big deal--implying that a bunch of people had recovered, and the system had handled them without even noticing.  So for practical purposes, you'd have to push the timeframe back even farther than March.)

[UK]

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-04-23/wuhan-s-return-to-life-temperature-checks-and-constant-anxiety

[Liberty]

if you look back at past flu epidemics (and there were 80K deaths in US in 2018), there was more fatalities for children and non-elderly than covid.  so what we did here was panic, based upon an assumed 3-4% mortality rate of those infected, not appreciating the number of infected without symptoms was much greater than assumed, and instituted an unprecedented lock down of our entire economy, when we should have realized based upon early covid evidence that a focus upon elderly was most efficacious.  and then we ignored the elderly largely by not ordering a no-visitation policy until late in the game.

 

we should admit our own deadly ignorance even as most of you kowtow to "experts". shame on all of us.

 

for those who think visions of "1984" (the book) in US are a bit much, here is your precedent.  politicians love power, and the greatest power is to tell you what to do in its most intimate details, all based upon "scientific fact" and the "wisdom of experts".  deblasio wants to have people report distancing violations to a special hot line....ooooh, how Stasi of us, isn't this wonderful!!!

 

LOL, is this your way of easing into saying you're wrong?

 

People who constantly talk about what we don't know usually do it when what we do know goes against what they'd like to believe.

 

If the data supported them, they'd talk about "let's look at the facts, gents".

 

But when it doesn't, they talk about what we don't know.

 

It's a fairly effective technique if you don't know about it.