Coronavirus 2019-nCoV

[wsushox1]

Whoa! So we might be a lot closer to herd immunity than we thought!

That study is inline with what Trevor Bedford thinks we are at. As you can see, still much, much farther from Herd Immunity.

[ShockerFever]

So on the flip side, is this virus not as contagious as we thought? It had capabilities of spreading like wildfire before the shutdown. Did we just stop it in time?

No real answers is correct.

[wsushox1]

So on the flip side, is this virus not as contagious as we thought? It had capabilities of spreading like wildfire before the shutdown. Did we just stop it in time?

No real answers is correct.

I think we stopped it just in time from being much, much more widespread through the rest of the country. If we had waited even 5-10 more days I bet we would have had a lot more New Orleans-type situations around the country - especially with sporting events such as conference tournaments and the NCAA tournament.

The NCAA tournament would have ended up being a massive vector of COVID.

[Kung Wu]

That study is inline with what Trevor Bedford thinks we are at. As you can see, still much, much farther from Herd Immunity.

Yes but ..... that's because we are dragging it out.

[Kung Wu]

That study is inline with what Trevor Bedford thinks we are at. As you can see, still much, much farther from Herd Immunity.

And, as I said, we are much CLOSER to herd immunity than originally thought.

[Kung Wu]

If 50-85x the reported cases is anywhere near accurate, then the state of New York has about 11,000,000 to 18,000,000 people walking around with antibodies.

[SB Shock]

China is starting to do some revisions in their count

https://khn.org/morning-breakout/mistaken-reporting-occurred-china-revises-wuhan-death-toll-upwards-by-50/

They have revised up their Wuhan deaths by 50%.

Their also seems to be a 2nd wave.

China city of Harbin has been put in lock-down with a new wave of infections. Harbin has been only reporting a handful of cases. But on April 15 the Chinese government replaced it's director of local health commission with no reason provided. But video have surfaced showing checkpoints into the city and lines at the hospital that were estimated to be 5,000 to 6,000 people.

[MelvinLoudermilk]

California study shows 50-80 fold more infections than reported. Many tested were already positive for antibodies


”Based on the initial data, researchers estimate that the range of people who may have had the virus to be between 48,000 and 81,000 in the county of 2 million — as opposed to the approximately 1,000 in the county’s official tally at the time the samples were taken.“


https://abcnews.go.com/Health/antibo...l_twitter_abcn

[wsushox1]

If 50-85x the reported cases is anywhere near accurate, then the state of New York has about 11,000,000 to 18,000,000 people walking around with antibodies.

I'm not sure that math is correct. You'd want to look at total percentage of population. Just did some quick math, and Santa Clara County has tested 10% of their population with a .09% positive test rate. NYC has tested 3% of their population with 1.5% of their total population confirmed.

If we assume that, on the high end 5% of the population has it (which is what the Santa Clara study has) - then yes you can say it's 50-85x the reported cases (50 *.09% = 4.5%). To get to 5% population presence in NYC you would just multiply by 3-4 times - which is probably low. I'd wager between 10-15% of NYC has had the virus. Still 4x lower than true "herd immunity" but much closer.

New York state has 19 million people in it. I can assure you that 57%-90%+ of people did not come in contact with the disease and have antibodies. You can't assume that the rate of undercounting will be the same in each region/state because there is just so many factors that play into that.

That's why we need seroprevalance tests in multiple regions to fit an average undercount rate.

[Kung Wu]

But that's not how the math works.

But it IS how the math works and is the premise behind the paper:

To date, in the absence of seroprevalence surveys, estimates of the fatality rate have relied on the number of confirmed cases multiplied by an estimate factor representing unknown or asymptomatic cases to arrive at the number of infections. However, the magnitude of that factor is highly uncertain. Because the implications of infection fatality rate and projected deaths are large, the extent of COVID-19 infection under-ascertainment (the multiplier used to arrive from cases to infections) has been a topic of great interest and provided estimates of the number of infections about 1-6 -fold higher than the number of cases.

The report says:

Our data imply that, by April 1 (three days prior to the end of our survey) between 48,000 and 81,000 people had been infected in Santa Clara County. The reported number of confirmed positive cases in the county on April 1 was 956, 50-85 -fold lower than the number of infections predicted by this study.

And goes on to say:

The infection to case ratio, also referred to as an under-ascertainment rate, of at least 50, is meaningfully higher than current estimates.
...
Many estimates of fatality rate use a ratio of deaths to lagged cases (because of duration from case confirmation to death), with an infections-to-cases ratio in the 1-5 -fold range as an estimate of under-ascertainment. Our study suggests that adjustments for under-ascertainment may need to be much higher.

The exact point they are making is to publish a factor that you can use to multiply against a known reported case load to determine the people in that population that have coronavirus.

Your assurance is in direct contradiction with their findings.

If they are right, the New York area should be getting close to herd immunity, which should cause new cases to taper off and deaths should stabilize fairly soon (as they lag new cases). Both of those things appear to be happening.

If they are right, it also explains why New York was hit so hard ... they exhausted an entire year's worth of "flu-like" illness in the compressed timeframe of 3 months.

[MelvinLoudermilk]

COVID-19 tests, and especially drive through testing sites do not draw blood. Antibodies can only be detected through blood

I did a 10 minute search and found more than a few drive-thru testing sites that draw blood

[wsushox1]

But it IS how the math works and is the premise behind the paper:

The report says:

And goes on to say:

The exact point they are making is to publish a factor that you can use to multiply against a known reported case load to determine the people in that population that have coronavirus.

Your assurance is in direct contradiction with their findings.

If they are right, the New York area should be getting close to herd immunity, which should cause new cases to taper off and deaths should stabilize fairly soon (as they lag new cases). Both of those things appear to be happening.

If they are right, it also explains why New York was hit so hard ... they exhausted an entire year's worth of "flu-like" illness in the compressed timeframe of 3 months.

I truly hope you are correct. But I would expect there to be seroprevalence variability from one location to another for a variety of reasons (R0 won't be the same, time of initial introduction, time of Shelter in Place order, etc). I have a hard time believing that 50-90% of New Yorkers have been exposed. But I hope you are correct. I'm a natural skeptic and pessimist so let that be known. Don't take my skepticism as me "rooting" for the virus. I'm currently furloughed and trying to pay off a wedding. It sucks, but I also have family in high risk groups who are still in the prime of life and I want to see them again (all family in KS, I live in NC).

As someone with a math minor (me), statistics is my considerable weak point. In fact, I've been using this time to continue to work through my Engineering Stats book again. Give me linear algebra or PDE's any day. Algos over confidence intervals any day ;)

Regardless of the undercount (which we know there is) - this study just hammers home the fact that the death rate is lower by orders of magnitude than what the numbers Deaths/Confirmed cases is.

[1972Shocker]

Israeli Professor Plots Rates of New Infections in a Dozen Countries and Makes a Stunning Discovery

https://www.redstate.com/elizabeth-v...ing-discovery/

Tel Aviv University Professor Isaac Ben-Israel is a prominent Israeli mathematician, analyst, and former general and is considered to be highly credible, but he is not a medical expert.

Ben-Israel plotted the rates of new infections in nearly a dozen countries including: U.S., U.K., Sweden, Italy, Israel, Switzerland, France, Germany, Spain, Singapore, and Taiwan. He concluded the following:

Simple statistical analysis demonstrates that the spread of COVID-19 peaks after about 40 days and declines to almost zero after 70 days — no matter where it strikes, and no matter what measures governments impose to try to thwart it.

So, Ben-Israel claims that a country that has taken extraordinary measures to contain the virus vs. a nation like Sweden, which has been relatively lax, will follow a fixed pattern. The virus will peak and recede “in the exact same way. In the exact, same, way. His graphs show that all countries experienced seemingly identical coronavirus infection patterns, with the number of infected peaking in the sixth week and rapidly subsiding by the eighth week.”

Asked to explain the phenomenon, Ben-Israel, who also heads Israel’s Space Agency, later said: “I have no explanation. There are all kinds of speculations. Maybe it’s related to climate, or the virus has a life-span of its own.”

When asked about the high morbidity rate in Italy, Ben-Israel replied, “The health system in Italy has its own problems. It has nothing to do with coronavirus. In 2017 it also collapsed because of the flu.”

It would be great if Ben-Israel's analysis is correct although I don't tins it proves the measure we have taken to mitigate were wrong. In fact, I think perhaps an argument could be made that they were the right thing to do if all fighting this off for 10 weeks does the trick. It also does not mean the virus won't be back for another run at a later date.

Will see if his analysis can stand up to peer review scrutiny.

[1979Shocker]

[h=1]Simple statistical analysis demonstrates that the spread of COVID-19 peaks after about 40 days and declines to almost zero after 70 days — no matter where it strikes, and no matter what measures governments impose to try to thwart it.

It's been well over 70 days since COVID-19 made it's way to the United States. Does this mean the virus should no longer be spreading and we can go back to our normal lives?

[wufan]

It's been well over 70 days since COVID-19 made it's way to the United States. Does this mean the virus should no longer be spreading and we can go back to our normal lives?

Yeah, I’m trying to understand why each country would follow this trend. This seems like a coincidence of data or source bias.