3 ms·

I see a lot of pushback on these studies showing high infection rates. To those people, what rate do you actually believe and why?

• skybrian 7y ago
  Based on these studies I think >90% of people in California don't have it, and how much higher is unknown.
• zucker42 7y ago
  There's not enough data to "believe" anything, and most of the pushback is because the studies are methodologically flawed. I think that fatality rate estimates between 0.5% and 1% seem to best match some of the early data on isolated populations, but I'm far from an epidemiological expert. That said, I think people would be a lot more accepting of data contradicting those rates if it didn't have clear issues.
• mcnamaratw 7y ago
  I feel more informed when I see an infection rate that's substantially higher than the rate of false positives from the test. So the NYC test of pregnant women at (13? 15%?) seems to be much higher than the 1% to 4% range of false positives that people seem to be estimating. But when test results are "down in the noise" I don't feel we're necessarily measuring anything.
• robryan 7y ago
  I don’t see our squares with our Australian numbers. How have we been able to bring the case numbers right down if there are as many asymptomatic cases and as high an R0 as these studies suggest. Our overall testing of people with symptoms has an under 2% positive rate with one of the highest per capita testing rates in the world. We have a lockdown but it isn’t so extreme as to be able to stop the kind of spread these studies are suggesting. The vast majority of our non imported cases have also been successfully contact traced, people by and large seem to be contracting it from other confirmed cases.