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I find this to be good even excellent news. It is quite possible the virus is not nearly as dangerous and lethal as people fear. If the young have nothing to w

I find this to be good even excellent news. It is quite possible the virus is not nearly as dangerous and lethal as people fear. If the young have nothing to worry about the prospects are pretty good. The best way to reach herd immunity is to have lots of immune people around you.

jbotz 7y ago
Since about a week ago data has been coming in from antibody testing in Europe... and the results are that IFR (infection fatality rate) is clearly less than 0.5% (0.37% in one city in germany[1]) and the number of actually infected people at least 15 times to 30 times higher than the confirmed number of cases. [1] https://www.n-tv.de/wissen/Heinsberg-Studie-entraetselt-Coronavirus-article21704605.html https://www.n-tv.de/wissen/Heinsberg-Studie-entraetselt-Coro...
- endymi0n 7y ago
  Note though that the study, its methods and especially its politically charged presentation by repeat social media offenders are still disputed [1] [1] https://www1.wdr.de/nachrichten/offene-fragen-heinsberg-studie-corona-100.html https://www1.wdr.de/nachrichten/offene-fragen-heinsberg-stud...
  - Barrin92 7y ago
    Today there's been a new result from antibody tests in the netherlands done on blood dononrs which showed about 3% infection rate. Extrapolated to the population that would imply 500k infections, 20x higher than the official stats. The Heinsberg study isn't the only source pointing to this. Almost a month ago the NYT also ran a story on randomly tested Iranian airplane passengers which suggested that as of that time there may already have been 500k-5mil infections in the country. https://www.straitstimes.com/world/europe/dutch-study-suggests-3-per-cent-of-population-may-have-coronavirus-antibodies https://www.straitstimes.com/world/europe/dutch-study-sugges...
    - perl4ever 7y ago
      Possibly dumb question, how do we know someone with antibodies was exposed? The whole idea of vaccination is based on multiple things producing the same antibodies, so isn't it plausible there could be related viruses or genetic factors or something that would lead to antibodies for some people that hadn't been exposed?
      - Barrin92 7y ago
        Yes, there is the chance of false positives with antibody tests, in particular for other strains of Corona, but scientists can do a sample of antibody tests on people they know to have been infected with covid-19 and get a rate for false positives and take that into account.
    - Lewton 7y ago
      Netherlands is currently at 30000 cases with 3000 dead, cfr of 10%. 20x infection would put the IFR at 0.5% which is well in line with what is expected
- joshuahedlund 7y ago
  I'm not so sure that's clear yet. Just going on blunt metrics, the virus has already killed 0.1% of NYC's entire population, probably on pace to hit 0.2% if the down-curve even only roughly matches the up-curve. So it would have had to have spread to 50% of the population for the fatality rate there to be only 0.4%, which seems unlikely (there's only a smattering of antibody data around the world so far but nothing has found spread even close to 50%, especially at the level of a metropolis)
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - claytongulick 7y ago
    When you include 3,700 non-positive deaths in your total death count, yeah - the numbers look scary. The reporting we're seeing is CFR, not mortality rate. They are very different things. Mortality rate is the number of deaths caused by a disease. CFR (Case Fatality Rate) is the total number of deaths by those diagnosed with a disease. They are very different numbers, and have very different meaning for different analysis and methodologies. Saying that that virus has killed .1% of NYC's population is inaccurate.
    - joshuahedlund 7y ago
      Even w/o those non-positives, the death count for NYC is in the neighborhood of 8,000[0] (and still rising at a decent clip) for a population of 8 million. That's 0.1%. You can also look at individual counties[1] and you get some variation but the same picture. Ex. 2.7k deaths in Queens for a population of 2.3mil, 0.4k deaths in Richmond for a population of 0.4mil (That's 0.1% for the entire population and not even nearing the maximum yet, so obviously the IFR's and CFR's will be even higher.) [0]https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/doh/downloads/pdf/imm/covid-19-deaths-confirmed-probable-daily-04152020.pdf https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/doh/downloads/pdf/imm/covid-19-d... [1]https://covid19tracker.health.ny.gov/views/NYS-COVID19-Tracker/NYSDOHCOVID-19Tracker-Fatalities?%3Aembed=yes&%3Atoolbar=no&%3Atabs=n https://covid19tracker.health.ny.gov/views/NYS-COVID19-Track...
- chefkoch 7y ago
  That study has been widely critized as there a many false positives with this kind of test and the counting method seems flawed.
- yread 7y ago
  As another data point in the Netherlands (officially 30k cases - only serious cases and hospital workers were tested, 30% of the tests are positives), actual seroprevalence is 3% ~500k people have been infected (~2 weeks ago), dividing the excess deaths, you get 1.3% mortality rate. https://twitter.com/jankluytmans/status/1250769486174654464 https://twitter.com/jankluytmans/status/1250769486174654464
kelnos 7y ago
The US military is not a representative sample of people; it's a bunch of people with better health and fitness than the general population. And the military is an institution that will reject people from joining based on a lot of the health conditions that make COVID-19 more dangerous to them. It's useful data, to be sure, but it also highlights that the disease can be really dangerous for people outside certain groups. > The best way to reach herd immunity is to have lots of immune people around you. It's not at all clear yet that recovering from COVID-19 confers any lasting immunity.
- Mikeb85 7y ago
  > It's not at all clear yet that recovering from COVID-19 confers any lasting immunity. Coronaviruses aren't new...
  - kelnos 7y ago
    Not sure how that's relevant. Coronaviruses behave differently from each other, and it's not clear how this one behaves wrt post-recovery immunity. And to your point, many forms of the "common cold" are caused by coronaviruses, and it's not like herd immunity is a thing there.
    - Mikeb85 7y ago
      Short to medium term immunity is conferred to survivors of other coronaviruses. No reason to expect it won't be the same with this one.
      - wbronitsky 7y ago
        This reasoning seems like it needs data. Do we have any proof that Coronavirus immunity is similar across different viruses? Why should we expect that things that have the same name have the same immune response? This is a pretty cavalier take when lives are at stake.
        7y ago
inamberclad 7y ago
In the future, you might have a lot of immune people around you. Right now, however, it means you have a lot of invisibly sick people around you.
- glofish 7y ago
  FWIW I am hoping that there are maximal number of invisibly sick people that never notice it, that is the best outcome you could have (other than nobody being sick of course) if you knew someone is unaffected getting exposed is not such a bad outcome.
hnCensorFreedum 7y ago
When we find out obese, smokers, asthma, were considering themselves "healthy" and not "at risk", it will explain a lot. Until then it seems day drinking has gone up, suicide, and home abuse has gone up. All because there's a 20% increased survival if you can be put on a ventilator. Flattening the curve may have some unintended consequences. My kid couldn't get his surgery in all of this..
pvaldes 7y ago
> the virus is not nearly as dangerous and lethal as people fear Whereas being still deadlier than the combination of all wolves, dogs, crocodiles, hippos, lions, tigers, elephants, sharks, spiders and all known venomous snakes in the planet... Any serial killer wannabee would kill for having the same results in just three months
- glofish 7y ago
  it is not such a great analogy though, considering that we have killed and exterminated most of the wolves, crocs, lions, hippos etc
  - pvaldes 7y ago
    Sometimes, David kill Goliath. This does not mean that Goliath was not dangerous. One of the problems with this situation is that human stupidiy hurts us all, and we of course aren't short of that. Most people that go to corona's infection parties would surely remain quiet at house if there was a Lion sitting at their door.
koyote 7y ago
> If the young have nothing to worry about the prospects are pretty good. Italy posts a weekly pdf analysing the demographics of their deceased: https://www.epicentro.iss.it/en/coronavirus/bollettino/Report-COVID-2019_13_april_2020.pdf https://www.epicentro.iss.it/en/coronavirus/bollettino/Repor... Not a single death of anyone between 10-19 and only one death under 10. 7 in their 20s. Those are statistically minuscule numbers considering Italy has over 22k deaths and over 168k confirmed positives. This paragraph is also quite interesting: "As of April 13th, 217 out of the 18,641 (1.2%) positive SARS-CoV-2 patients under the age of 50 died. In particular, 47 of these were less than 40 years (32 men and 15 women), age range between 5 and 39 years. For 6 patients under the age of 40 years no clinical information is available; the remaining 33 had serious pre-existing pathologies (cardiovascular, renal, psychiatric pathologies, diabetes, obesity) and 8 had no major pathologies."

jbotz 7y ago

Since about a week ago data has been coming in from antibody testing in Europe... and the results are that IFR (infection fatality rate) is clearly less than 0.5% (0.37% in one city in germany[1]) and the number of actually infected people at least 15 times to 30 times higher than the confirmed number of cases. [1] https://www.n-tv.de/wissen/Heinsberg-Studie-entraetselt-Coronavirus-article21704605.html https://www.n-tv.de/wissen/Heinsberg-Studie-entraetselt-Coro...

endymi0n 7y ago
Note though that the study, its methods and especially its politically charged presentation by repeat social media offenders are still disputed [1] [1] https://www1.wdr.de/nachrichten/offene-fragen-heinsberg-studie-corona-100.html https://www1.wdr.de/nachrichten/offene-fragen-heinsberg-stud...
- Barrin92 7y ago
  Today there's been a new result from antibody tests in the netherlands done on blood dononrs which showed about 3% infection rate. Extrapolated to the population that would imply 500k infections, 20x higher than the official stats. The Heinsberg study isn't the only source pointing to this. Almost a month ago the NYT also ran a story on randomly tested Iranian airplane passengers which suggested that as of that time there may already have been 500k-5mil infections in the country. https://www.straitstimes.com/world/europe/dutch-study-suggests-3-per-cent-of-population-may-have-coronavirus-antibodies https://www.straitstimes.com/world/europe/dutch-study-sugges...
  - perl4ever 7y ago
    Possibly dumb question, how do we know someone with antibodies was exposed? The whole idea of vaccination is based on multiple things producing the same antibodies, so isn't it plausible there could be related viruses or genetic factors or something that would lead to antibodies for some people that hadn't been exposed?
    - Barrin92 7y ago
      Yes, there is the chance of false positives with antibody tests, in particular for other strains of Corona, but scientists can do a sample of antibody tests on people they know to have been infected with covid-19 and get a rate for false positives and take that into account.
  - Lewton 7y ago
    Netherlands is currently at 30000 cases with 3000 dead, cfr of 10%. 20x infection would put the IFR at 0.5% which is well in line with what is expected
joshuahedlund 7y ago
I'm not so sure that's clear yet. Just going on blunt metrics, the virus has already killed 0.1% of NYC's entire population, probably on pace to hit 0.2% if the down-curve even only roughly matches the up-curve. So it would have had to have spread to 50% of the population for the fatality rate there to be only 0.4%, which seems unlikely (there's only a smattering of antibody data around the world so far but nothing has found spread even close to 50%, especially at the level of a metropolis)
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- claytongulick 7y ago
  When you include 3,700 non-positive deaths in your total death count, yeah - the numbers look scary. The reporting we're seeing is CFR, not mortality rate. They are very different things. Mortality rate is the number of deaths caused by a disease. CFR (Case Fatality Rate) is the total number of deaths by those diagnosed with a disease. They are very different numbers, and have very different meaning for different analysis and methodologies. Saying that that virus has killed .1% of NYC's population is inaccurate.
  - joshuahedlund 7y ago
    Even w/o those non-positives, the death count for NYC is in the neighborhood of 8,000[0] (and still rising at a decent clip) for a population of 8 million. That's 0.1%. You can also look at individual counties[1] and you get some variation but the same picture. Ex. 2.7k deaths in Queens for a population of 2.3mil, 0.4k deaths in Richmond for a population of 0.4mil (That's 0.1% for the entire population and not even nearing the maximum yet, so obviously the IFR's and CFR's will be even higher.) [0]https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/doh/downloads/pdf/imm/covid-19-deaths-confirmed-probable-daily-04152020.pdf https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/doh/downloads/pdf/imm/covid-19-d... [1]https://covid19tracker.health.ny.gov/views/NYS-COVID19-Tracker/NYSDOHCOVID-19Tracker-Fatalities?%3Aembed=yes&%3Atoolbar=no&%3Atabs=n https://covid19tracker.health.ny.gov/views/NYS-COVID19-Track...
chefkoch 7y ago
That study has been widely critized as there a many false positives with this kind of test and the counting method seems flawed.
yread 7y ago
As another data point in the Netherlands (officially 30k cases - only serious cases and hospital workers were tested, 30% of the tests are positives), actual seroprevalence is 3% ~500k people have been infected (~2 weeks ago), dividing the excess deaths, you get 1.3% mortality rate. https://twitter.com/jankluytmans/status/1250769486174654464 https://twitter.com/jankluytmans/status/1250769486174654464

kelnos 7y ago

The US military is not a representative sample of people; it's a bunch of people with better health and fitness than the general population. And the military is an institution that will reject people from joining based on a lot of the health conditions that make COVID-19 more dangerous to them. It's useful data, to be sure, but it also highlights that the disease can be really dangerous for people outside certain groups. > The best way to reach herd immunity is to have lots of immune people around you. It's not at all clear yet that recovering from COVID-19 confers any lasting immunity.

Mikeb85 7y ago
> It's not at all clear yet that recovering from COVID-19 confers any lasting immunity. Coronaviruses aren't new...
- kelnos 7y ago
  Not sure how that's relevant. Coronaviruses behave differently from each other, and it's not clear how this one behaves wrt post-recovery immunity. And to your point, many forms of the "common cold" are caused by coronaviruses, and it's not like herd immunity is a thing there.
  - Mikeb85 7y ago
    Short to medium term immunity is conferred to survivors of other coronaviruses. No reason to expect it won't be the same with this one.
    - wbronitsky 7y ago
      This reasoning seems like it needs data. Do we have any proof that Coronavirus immunity is similar across different viruses? Why should we expect that things that have the same name have the same immune response? This is a pretty cavalier take when lives are at stake.
      - 7y ago

inamberclad 7y ago

In the future, you might have a lot of immune people around you. Right now, however, it means you have a lot of invisibly sick people around you.

glofish 7y ago
FWIW I am hoping that there are maximal number of invisibly sick people that never notice it, that is the best outcome you could have (other than nobody being sick of course) if you knew someone is unaffected getting exposed is not such a bad outcome.

hnCensorFreedum 7y ago

When we find out obese, smokers, asthma, were considering themselves "healthy" and not "at risk", it will explain a lot. Until then it seems day drinking has gone up, suicide, and home abuse has gone up. All because there's a 20% increased survival if you can be put on a ventilator. Flattening the curve may have some unintended consequences. My kid couldn't get his surgery in all of this..

pvaldes 7y ago

> the virus is not nearly as dangerous and lethal as people fear Whereas being still deadlier than the combination of all wolves, dogs, crocodiles, hippos, lions, tigers, elephants, sharks, spiders and all known venomous snakes in the planet... Any serial killer wannabee would kill for having the same results in just three months

glofish 7y ago
it is not such a great analogy though, considering that we have killed and exterminated most of the wolves, crocs, lions, hippos etc
- pvaldes 7y ago
  Sometimes, David kill Goliath. This does not mean that Goliath was not dangerous. One of the problems with this situation is that human stupidiy hurts us all, and we of course aren't short of that. Most people that go to corona's infection parties would surely remain quiet at house if there was a Lion sitting at their door.

koyote 7y ago

> If the young have nothing to worry about the prospects are pretty good. Italy posts a weekly pdf analysing the demographics of their deceased: https://www.epicentro.iss.it/en/coronavirus/bollettino/Report-COVID-2019_13_april_2020.pdf https://www.epicentro.iss.it/en/coronavirus/bollettino/Repor... Not a single death of anyone between 10-19 and only one death under 10. 7 in their 20s. Those are statistically minuscule numbers considering Italy has over 22k deaths and over 168k confirmed positives. This paragraph is also quite interesting: "As of April 13th, 217 out of the 18,641 (1.2%) positive SARS-CoV-2 patients under the age of 50 died. In particular, 47 of these were less than 40 years (32 men and 15 women), age range between 5 and 39 years. For 6 patients under the age of 40 years no clinical information is available; the remaining 33 had serious pre-existing pathologies (cardiovascular, renal, psychiatric pathologies, diabetes, obesity) and 8 had no major pathologies."