Hundreds of thousands or millions of unreported cases?
lol
1 Like
I dunno about this. I was pretty hopeful a couple weeks ago that there was a huge stealth epidemic that went unnoticed, but lately the evidence has been pointing in the wrong direction for that theory. Chris has posted some semi-random testing evidence that seems to disprove the idea, at least in Australia, that a big percentage of the population is asymptomatically infected. It’s strange. Really seems like we should be grabbing 1000 people off the street every week and testing them to get some understanding of WTF is going on.
1 Like
UK coronavirus deaths rise by record 938 to 7,097
The number of people who have died with coronavirus in UK hospitals has risen to 7,097 - a record increase of 938 in a day.
Experts warn against over-interpreting daily figures, since spikes or dips may in part reflect bottlenecks in the reporting system, rather than real changes in the trend.
There have been a lot of those around the world. They mostly find zero antibodies in places that haven’t been hit.
https://twitter.com/JDVance1/status/1247727124837994496
meanwhile, in the real world, university research budgets have been decimated, while, coincidentally, jack and peers have gotten unimaginably rich.
Basically it comes down to whether you think having the ultra wealthy pick a handful of the best monkeys to sit at typewriters is better than just having a thousand times more monkeys at typewriters.
5 Likes
So we think it spreads way faster than we thought, but we don’t think an insanely higher number of people had it than we thought.
What do we think we think that means?
Could be that asymptomatic cases are more prevalent than we realized and don’t lead to increased antibodies? Could be that the antibodies don’t last long at all, thus rendering antibody tests kind of useless? Could be that minor social distancing is extremely effective at reducing the effective R0? (What’s that called, Re?)
Could it be that some people fight it off quickly with normal coronavirus antibodies that can’t be detected in a specific COVID-19 test?
I mean it’s kind of out of whack, right? With an R0 of 5.7 we’d expect this to be significantly worse than we’re seeing so far. Shouldn’t it be Italy bad everywhere?
If the R0 is that high then I dunno wtf and am retiring from Dartboard Virology with what I consider a very respectable track record. Everything I can think of carries implications that don’t seem borne out in reality.
In places like NY, Spain, UK it basically is already Italy level bad except for those places had 7-10 days to gear up for the fight that Italy did not have. As for the rest of the world it just hasn’t gotten here yet and the social distancing/lockdowns are working to some extent. NY has a lower population and more new cases and deaths than Italy had at the peak.
It also means if you try and open up the country too soon you are looking at this coming back full force maybe worse.
5 Likes
Shit, need a lot higher % for herd immunity if the r0 is that high
1 Like
Yeah that’s fine
But the mortality rate right now is like 3%+
If undercounting means it’s more like 1%, that’s still a ton of people dead
Nah, that’s a garbage take too. The South Korean government is doing amazing work combating this. The CDC and other agencies were really quick to isolate and sequence this thing.
The ideological libertarian solution is to have a slumlord businessbro become president and slash our government’s disease response teams. Well we did that and it sure didn’t fucking work but the libertarians are somehow still insisting that we need to slash the evil government and then the billionaires will swoop in and save us. Maybe put Elon in charge of NIH, he’ll know what to do, surely.
9 Likes
The swab tests don’t look for antibodies.
The implication of this (if it’s correct) is that more people than we thought are getting this and not getting ill.
Right, but the genetic analysis that Vance refers to is predicated in part on the idea that you can figure out when the virus was introduced, then work forward based on how fast it spreads to see how many people could be infected. If it spreads much faster than thought, more people should have it, but they seem not to.
Sigh. We’ve been through this. The apparent mortality rate has been done on deaths now over cases now. Only when we get to the end will we know the truly mortality rate. Other countries with curves similar to the US would say on the higher end of the range. Yes there are at least three big factors
-undercounting cases- works to lower % mortality
-lag in deaths compared to cases- works to increase % mortality
-undercounting of deaths - also increases % mortality
Literally the difference is some over a shit ton of deaths up to and maybe over a fuck ton.
Just use a round 1% for now and should get in the standard -50% to + 100% range on most SWAGs.
And remember those numbers were living breathing human beings until this thing came along and there are a shit ton more of them dead than there should have been (see Bay Area counties vs New York or what’s coming in Florida.
Keeeeeed— I am uncertain if you are just making an observation or you are trying to minimize for some political point. Sadly you don’t get the benefit of the doubt until proven otherwise. If I’m wrong, my apologies but the best predictor of present and future behavior is past behavior.
3 Likes
The point to me is that prevalence = hospitalization and death. If your hospitals haven’t been hit hard, then it hasn’t spread in your area yet. There is no stealth spread in an area. No secret herd immunity building up in areas that haven’t been hit.
3 Likes
It definitely does not come down to only those two things.
The West Wing Liberal bro take is to always give the government more power. How’s that work out when Donald Trump gets to be President? Or Ronald Reagan? Or George Bush?
There is no group more magical thinking Utopian than the West Wing Liberals.
Billionaires as a class are bad because of the types of people who do what it takes to get rich and what being rich does to people. It’s just as bad for government. Generally those in power will have had to be terrible people in debt to other terrible people and then there’s pressure on them to lie and to protect the status quo once they get into power. Sure, there are exceptions, but the systemic pressures mean the average with be shitty.