6 ms·

These seem like made-up statistics: 1. "The actual fatality rate of Covid-19 is the region of 0.1%" 2. "At least 50% of the population of both the UK and Swed

These seem like made-up statistics: 1. "The actual fatality rate of Covid-19 is the region of 0.1%" 2. "At least 50% of the population of both the UK and Sweden will be shown to have already had the disease when mass antibody testing becomes available"

alharith 7y ago
1. It's about as made up as the WHO's 3.4% figure. 2. Most thinkers I know and follow widely believe this to be the case as well, it also passes the common sense test. (OK, 3.4% of reported cases, my point is they have thrown out death rates as well, all of them can be considered fantasy because we have zero clue what the denominator is)
- esoterica 7y ago
  The WHO never said the infection fatality rate is 3.4%. Here's the actual transcript the number is taken from: https://www.who.int/dg/speeches/detail/who-director-general-s-opening-remarks-at-the-media-briefing-on-covid-19---3-march-2020 https://www.who.int/dg/speeches/detail/who-director-general-... > Globally, about 3.4% of reported COVID-19 cases have died. They said that 3.4% of REPORTED cases had died, which was true at that point. > Most thinkers I know and follow widely believe this to be the case as well, it also passes the common sense test. 0.015% of the Swedish population has died so far from the coronavirus. On the other hand ~0.15% of NYC has already died from the coronavirus. If the majority of the Swedish population is already infected, why is the death rate only 1/10th that of NYC? How does that pass the "common sense test"?
- iforgotpassword 7y ago
  > Most thinkers I know I hope that doesn't translate to "people in the same Facebook groups like me", i.e. the typical echo chamber effect. It's amazing how there can be a hundred experts plus hard figures, studies, whatnot, which then get strictly ignored by those "just the flu" folks, which forward the same handful of interviews with some doctor or virologist on WhatsApp or Facebook claiming we're overreacting, it's just a slightly more aggressive kind of flu, mass panic, coming up with excuses why Wuhan, Italy and NY don't quite fit what they're saying, but no convincing counter argument yet. Sure it would be the more convenient truth, or you just feel woke, but there are more and more places on this planet that simply show this is not true.
  - thu2111 7y ago
    But they could argue the reverse: it's amazing how there can be so many experts plus hard figures, studies, papers all saying that this is hardly more dangerous than the flu, and all that is strictly ignored by those who insist that the situation in two or three places is the only data that should be used and everything else should be ignored. there are more and more places on this planet that simply show this is not true. But there are far more places that seem to show it is true. So whose data do you believe? At some point it boils down to the same way people make decisions in every other area of politics.
    - mbrameld 7y ago
      Can you link to some of the studies and papers?
      - thu2111 7y ago
        See my other comments. This is the best link collection I know of: https://swprs.org/a-swiss-doctor-on-covid-19/ https://swprs.org/a-swiss-doctor-on-covid-19/ It's concise, dense and to the point.
    - iforgotpassword 7y ago
      But that's exactly the point. I haven't seen any of these things from those people. Just hand waving and statements like the ones I gave above, without serious further attempts to strengthen them by, you know, logic and arguments. Like saying it's caused by mass panics because of the fear of the unknown, now that it has a name that is not the flu. When this thing started in China, it was initially assumed to be just that, then when evidence showed up it wouldn't be, there was the initial cover-up phase. Everybody involved at that point was pretty much doctors and other experts which aren't exactly the random dork that just panics, as well as government officials who's last desire is to have that go public. Yet they reached the point where they couldn't deny it anymore and started taking drastic measures. No good explanation for this I've come across so far. Then Europe, Italy first. Again the government and the people ignored this as much as possible. It's the China flu, it can't affect normal humans like us. Milan had the famous "let's keep going" campaign. There was absolutely no sort of panic, besides maybe the panic buying of toilet paper etc. People only really started to change when their hospitals got overloaded and you could actually see the effects of this in everyday life. Yet those claiming this is just the flu like to change it around and say there was panic first which somehow lead to overcrowded hospitals. Even that part isn't very clear, given that testing was ramped up slowly, initially you couldn't just get the test if you didn't have any contact with an infected person, or were in China recently. Even if you were tested positive you were sent home if your symptoms were only mild. So even assuming there was some sort of panic, hospitals wouldn't suddenly have accepted people with mild symptoms (just like with the flu every year before). So how did the hospitals get so full? Then I've heard a German virologist say that Italian hospitals have terrible hygiene, and people with covid19 who would have otherwise survived then got other infections in the hospital and died of those, so just died with covid19 but not of. Why didn't that happen the years before with regular flu patients? Again it's not like the hospitals accepted people with mild symptoms because they thought it would be funny to fill up the hospital beds. Also I guess by the same logic HIV is no biggie since you only die with it.
bobcostas55 7y ago
The first one is trivially wrong. In NYC more than 0.1% of the _population_ (not the infected) has died already. The second is less trivially wrong, but there's a lot of evidence against it: tests from Wuhan[0], Denmark[1], the Netherlands[2] all show very low infection rates, around 3-4%. [0]: https://www.wsj.com/articles/wuhan-starts-testing-to-determine-level-of-immunity-from-coronavirus-11587039175?mod=searchresults&page=1&pos=2 https://www.wsj.com/articles/wuhan-starts-testing-to-determi... [1]: https://nyheder.tv2.dk/samfund/2020-04-17-stor-screening-viser-omfang-af-corona-smitte-hos-sundhedspersonale https://nyheder.tv2.dk/samfund/2020-04-17-stor-screening-vis... [2]: https://nltimes.nl/2020/04/16/3-dutch-blood-donors-covid-19-antibodies https://nltimes.nl/2020/04/16/3-dutch-blood-donors-covid-19-...
- cameldrv 7y ago
  There was a town in Italy that actually had 70% positive antibodies among blood donors. The only problem is 1.4% of the population of the town died in March.
  - jfoster 7y ago
    Which town?
    - cameldrv 7y ago
      Castiglione d'Adda
  - rstuart4133 7y ago
    So 1% death rate per unit population, or 1 person in 100. I guess that means if New York's lock down didn't reduce that 70% of the population getting infected, with a population of 20M or so they can expect around 2M deaths.
- fouc 7y ago
  17,671 deaths / 8,398,748 population * 100% = 0.21%
fiter 7y ago
The recent study in Santa Clara County suggests it may be between 0.12 and 0.20 though it suggests only a couple percent have had it there: https://www.sfgate.com/news/editorspicks/article/Santa-Clara-antibody-test-coronavirus-results-case-15208216.php https://www.sfgate.com/news/editorspicks/article/Santa-Clara...
- generalpass 7y ago
  That isn't a random sample, so they had to massage the numbers.
  - fiter 7y ago
    Indeed, that is stated in the article. Do you have any specific concerns with their methodology that would cause the results to have an even larger error range than they account for?
    - ivanonymous 7y ago
      Sampling uncertainties aside, this is super sensitive to mis-estimating the false positive rate. Which they seem fairly likely to have done, using an estimated test specificity of 100% (with error bars) in one branch of their analysis after getting 30/30 negatives against pre-COVID serum samples. Too small a sample to get that confident in an atypically high specificity, especially if that collection of samples was disproportionately low antibody (e.g. summer blood rather than post cold/flu season blood). That's to my mind the most consequential misestimation of the test characteristics, but Balaji Srinivasan details more: https://medium.com/@balajis/peer-review-of-covid-19-antibody-seroprevalence-in-santa-clara-county-california-1f6382258c25 https://medium.com/@balajis/peer-review-of-covid-19-antibody...
m3kw9 7y ago
Is 0.1 when the ventilators/hospital treatments are used? If the spike happens and people that needs it but don’t have it, how would deaths look like?not sure if he took that into account with the 0.1, otherwise he is not much of an epidemiologist
safog 7y ago
I agree. I have several objections to this line of thought. Of course Sweden might want to risk its entire population on made up data but I don't think that's a prudent approach. 1. When we put in these lockdown measures, we basically had very little science behind the disease. Not locking down and hoping things generalize from very small sample sized studies coming out of Italy (which did enter lockdown at that point) is not prudent policy. 2. The only clean room evidence we have even now is the US Naval carrier that was exposed to COVID. It turned out that amongst those infected, 30% of the sailors were just asymptomatic. Previous modeling assumptions that US policy is driven off of were using 15-20% are asymptomatic. Okay, fine our initial assumptions were off a little, but not orders of magnitude off. 3. The other problem with the Swedish approach is that you can't simply isolate old people in isolation from younger people - healthcare workers, nursing home workers etc. are all fairly young and can be asymptomatic COVID carriers. 4. Even if the mortality for younger folks is ~0.1% the toll that COVID is taking on the lungs of even recovered patients is pretty brutal (anecdotal evidence, needs more study). Especially, if you're an athlete or want 100% lung capacity for the rest of your life, it's a bit iffy at this point if you'll actually get it. It also looks like it's hitting multiple organs and not just lungs, again we don't have much science here at this point. 5. I was hoping we could do antibody testing as a way to judge who can safely go out, but I was watching a Bill Gates interview yesterday and it looks like the testing is not good enough yet to make that call - it still has too high a false positive rate, people with antibodies still can get reinfected if their viral load the first time was enough to only trigger a mild infection.
shalmanese 7y ago
I can't believe we're still having this debate in April when it should have been settled in Feb. After Wuhan got hit, a bunch of countries repatriated their citizens and tested every single person. From Reddit: South Korea: 802 imported cases, 17 from China, 389 from Europe, 306 from Americas. Taiwan: evacuated 975 from Wuhan so far, only 1 tested positive. 728 evacuated from Wuhan since March 10th, 0 positives. Singapore: ~80% of 800 cases imported, 24 from China. Ontario (Province of Canada): 968 imported cases, US 318, UK 101, Mexico 49, Spain 46, Germany 34... China 5. HK 1 - HK has 200x less population than China. It was clear Wuhan was hit by something incredibly deadly that had only barely started inching its way through the population. South Korea is one of the most comprehensively tested nations on the planet and their death rate right now is 2%. People are still desperately clinging onto a narrative that this thing is way less deadly than it appears and twisting and distorting all sorts of stats to get them there but it just plain is vanishingly unlikely to be true. This virus started with Westerners assuming that they were somehow exceptionally different from Asians and did not need to learn from their experience and it will end with Westerners assuming that they are exceptionally different from Asians and do not need to learn from their experiences.
- Markoff 7y ago
  those numbers are not really comparable if you don't factor demographics like proportion of age groups in population, average life expectancy, how overloaded or capable is the health system, how are deaths counted and social habits like cogenerational living (IT/ES) vs most single person households at least in Europe (SE) or even how people socialize with greetings (FR, ES, IT), how common is social distancing many of these would explain why SoKo, Japan and Sweden fare well without lockdown

alharith 7y ago

1. It's about as made up as the WHO's 3.4% figure. 2. Most thinkers I know and follow widely believe this to be the case as well, it also passes the common sense test. (OK, 3.4% of reported cases, my point is they have thrown out death rates as well, all of them can be considered fantasy because we have zero clue what the denominator is)

esoterica 7y ago
The WHO never said the infection fatality rate is 3.4%. Here's the actual transcript the number is taken from: https://www.who.int/dg/speeches/detail/who-director-general-s-opening-remarks-at-the-media-briefing-on-covid-19---3-march-2020 https://www.who.int/dg/speeches/detail/who-director-general-... > Globally, about 3.4% of reported COVID-19 cases have died. They said that 3.4% of REPORTED cases had died, which was true at that point. > Most thinkers I know and follow widely believe this to be the case as well, it also passes the common sense test. 0.015% of the Swedish population has died so far from the coronavirus. On the other hand ~0.15% of NYC has already died from the coronavirus. If the majority of the Swedish population is already infected, why is the death rate only 1/10th that of NYC? How does that pass the "common sense test"?
iforgotpassword 7y ago
> Most thinkers I know I hope that doesn't translate to "people in the same Facebook groups like me", i.e. the typical echo chamber effect. It's amazing how there can be a hundred experts plus hard figures, studies, whatnot, which then get strictly ignored by those "just the flu" folks, which forward the same handful of interviews with some doctor or virologist on WhatsApp or Facebook claiming we're overreacting, it's just a slightly more aggressive kind of flu, mass panic, coming up with excuses why Wuhan, Italy and NY don't quite fit what they're saying, but no convincing counter argument yet. Sure it would be the more convenient truth, or you just feel woke, but there are more and more places on this planet that simply show this is not true.
- thu2111 7y ago
  But they could argue the reverse: it's amazing how there can be so many experts plus hard figures, studies, papers all saying that this is hardly more dangerous than the flu, and all that is strictly ignored by those who insist that the situation in two or three places is the only data that should be used and everything else should be ignored. there are more and more places on this planet that simply show this is not true. But there are far more places that seem to show it is true. So whose data do you believe? At some point it boils down to the same way people make decisions in every other area of politics.
  - mbrameld 7y ago
    Can you link to some of the studies and papers?
    - thu2111 7y ago
      See my other comments. This is the best link collection I know of: https://swprs.org/a-swiss-doctor-on-covid-19/ https://swprs.org/a-swiss-doctor-on-covid-19/ It's concise, dense and to the point.
  - iforgotpassword 7y ago
    But that's exactly the point. I haven't seen any of these things from those people. Just hand waving and statements like the ones I gave above, without serious further attempts to strengthen them by, you know, logic and arguments. Like saying it's caused by mass panics because of the fear of the unknown, now that it has a name that is not the flu. When this thing started in China, it was initially assumed to be just that, then when evidence showed up it wouldn't be, there was the initial cover-up phase. Everybody involved at that point was pretty much doctors and other experts which aren't exactly the random dork that just panics, as well as government officials who's last desire is to have that go public. Yet they reached the point where they couldn't deny it anymore and started taking drastic measures. No good explanation for this I've come across so far. Then Europe, Italy first. Again the government and the people ignored this as much as possible. It's the China flu, it can't affect normal humans like us. Milan had the famous "let's keep going" campaign. There was absolutely no sort of panic, besides maybe the panic buying of toilet paper etc. People only really started to change when their hospitals got overloaded and you could actually see the effects of this in everyday life. Yet those claiming this is just the flu like to change it around and say there was panic first which somehow lead to overcrowded hospitals. Even that part isn't very clear, given that testing was ramped up slowly, initially you couldn't just get the test if you didn't have any contact with an infected person, or were in China recently. Even if you were tested positive you were sent home if your symptoms were only mild. So even assuming there was some sort of panic, hospitals wouldn't suddenly have accepted people with mild symptoms (just like with the flu every year before). So how did the hospitals get so full? Then I've heard a German virologist say that Italian hospitals have terrible hygiene, and people with covid19 who would have otherwise survived then got other infections in the hospital and died of those, so just died with covid19 but not of. Why didn't that happen the years before with regular flu patients? Again it's not like the hospitals accepted people with mild symptoms because they thought it would be funny to fill up the hospital beds. Also I guess by the same logic HIV is no biggie since you only die with it.

bobcostas55 7y ago

The first one is trivially wrong. In NYC more than 0.1% of the _population_ (not the infected) has died already. The second is less trivially wrong, but there's a lot of evidence against it: tests from Wuhan[0], Denmark[1], the Netherlands[2] all show very low infection rates, around 3-4%. [0]: https://www.wsj.com/articles/wuhan-starts-testing-to-determine-level-of-immunity-from-coronavirus-11587039175?mod=searchresults&page=1&pos=2 https://www.wsj.com/articles/wuhan-starts-testing-to-determi... [1]: https://nyheder.tv2.dk/samfund/2020-04-17-stor-screening-viser-omfang-af-corona-smitte-hos-sundhedspersonale https://nyheder.tv2.dk/samfund/2020-04-17-stor-screening-vis... [2]: https://nltimes.nl/2020/04/16/3-dutch-blood-donors-covid-19-antibodies https://nltimes.nl/2020/04/16/3-dutch-blood-donors-covid-19-...

cameldrv 7y ago
There was a town in Italy that actually had 70% positive antibodies among blood donors. The only problem is 1.4% of the population of the town died in March.
- jfoster 7y ago
  Which town?
  - cameldrv 7y ago
    Castiglione d'Adda
- rstuart4133 7y ago
  So 1% death rate per unit population, or 1 person in 100. I guess that means if New York's lock down didn't reduce that 70% of the population getting infected, with a population of 20M or so they can expect around 2M deaths.
fouc 7y ago
17,671 deaths / 8,398,748 population * 100% = 0.21%

fiter 7y ago

The recent study in Santa Clara County suggests it may be between 0.12 and 0.20 though it suggests only a couple percent have had it there: https://www.sfgate.com/news/editorspicks/article/Santa-Clara-antibody-test-coronavirus-results-case-15208216.php https://www.sfgate.com/news/editorspicks/article/Santa-Clara...

generalpass 7y ago
That isn't a random sample, so they had to massage the numbers.
- fiter 7y ago
  Indeed, that is stated in the article. Do you have any specific concerns with their methodology that would cause the results to have an even larger error range than they account for?
  - ivanonymous 7y ago
    Sampling uncertainties aside, this is super sensitive to mis-estimating the false positive rate. Which they seem fairly likely to have done, using an estimated test specificity of 100% (with error bars) in one branch of their analysis after getting 30/30 negatives against pre-COVID serum samples. Too small a sample to get that confident in an atypically high specificity, especially if that collection of samples was disproportionately low antibody (e.g. summer blood rather than post cold/flu season blood). That's to my mind the most consequential misestimation of the test characteristics, but Balaji Srinivasan details more: https://medium.com/@balajis/peer-review-of-covid-19-antibody-seroprevalence-in-santa-clara-county-california-1f6382258c25 https://medium.com/@balajis/peer-review-of-covid-19-antibody...

m3kw9 7y ago

Is 0.1 when the ventilators/hospital treatments are used? If the spike happens and people that needs it but don’t have it, how would deaths look like?not sure if he took that into account with the 0.1, otherwise he is not much of an epidemiologist

safog 7y ago

I agree. I have several objections to this line of thought. Of course Sweden might want to risk its entire population on made up data but I don't think that's a prudent approach. 1. When we put in these lockdown measures, we basically had very little science behind the disease. Not locking down and hoping things generalize from very small sample sized studies coming out of Italy (which did enter lockdown at that point) is not prudent policy. 2. The only clean room evidence we have even now is the US Naval carrier that was exposed to COVID. It turned out that amongst those infected, 30% of the sailors were just asymptomatic. Previous modeling assumptions that US policy is driven off of were using 15-20% are asymptomatic. Okay, fine our initial assumptions were off a little, but not orders of magnitude off. 3. The other problem with the Swedish approach is that you can't simply isolate old people in isolation from younger people - healthcare workers, nursing home workers etc. are all fairly young and can be asymptomatic COVID carriers. 4. Even if the mortality for younger folks is ~0.1% the toll that COVID is taking on the lungs of even recovered patients is pretty brutal (anecdotal evidence, needs more study). Especially, if you're an athlete or want 100% lung capacity for the rest of your life, it's a bit iffy at this point if you'll actually get it. It also looks like it's hitting multiple organs and not just lungs, again we don't have much science here at this point. 5. I was hoping we could do antibody testing as a way to judge who can safely go out, but I was watching a Bill Gates interview yesterday and it looks like the testing is not good enough yet to make that call - it still has too high a false positive rate, people with antibodies still can get reinfected if their viral load the first time was enough to only trigger a mild infection.

shalmanese 7y ago

I can't believe we're still having this debate in April when it should have been settled in Feb. After Wuhan got hit, a bunch of countries repatriated their citizens and tested every single person. From Reddit: South Korea: 802 imported cases, 17 from China, 389 from Europe, 306 from Americas. Taiwan: evacuated 975 from Wuhan so far, only 1 tested positive. 728 evacuated from Wuhan since March 10th, 0 positives. Singapore: ~80% of 800 cases imported, 24 from China. Ontario (Province of Canada): 968 imported cases, US 318, UK 101, Mexico 49, Spain 46, Germany 34... China 5. HK 1 - HK has 200x less population than China. It was clear Wuhan was hit by something incredibly deadly that had only barely started inching its way through the population. South Korea is one of the most comprehensively tested nations on the planet and their death rate right now is 2%. People are still desperately clinging onto a narrative that this thing is way less deadly than it appears and twisting and distorting all sorts of stats to get them there but it just plain is vanishingly unlikely to be true. This virus started with Westerners assuming that they were somehow exceptionally different from Asians and did not need to learn from their experience and it will end with Westerners assuming that they are exceptionally different from Asians and do not need to learn from their experiences.

Markoff 7y ago
those numbers are not really comparable if you don't factor demographics like proportion of age groups in population, average life expectancy, how overloaded or capable is the health system, how are deaths counted and social habits like cogenerational living (IT/ES) vs most single person households at least in Europe (SE) or even how people socialize with greetings (FR, ES, IT), how common is social distancing many of these would explain why SoKo, Japan and Sweden fare well without lockdown