4 ms·

That SARS-CoV-2 was in our environment for months longer than thought, that 20% or more of Americans may already have antibodies, that tons of people suffered f

That SARS-CoV-2 was in our environment for months longer than thought, that 20% or more of Americans may already have antibodies, that tons of people suffered from not being able to get essential heart, dental and other surgery in preparation for some mythical surge that wouldn't have even happened anyway. That there's no evidence social distancing did anything at all? There are tons of other possibilities here. There simply isn't enough data, and won't be until Feb 2021 where we can retroactively look back at data that is cleaned, pruned and properly averaged.

pbhjpbhj 6y ago
What data do you think will exist by next year that we don't have now? Doctors have recorded those who died with respiratory distress and other Covid19 symptoms, and that tested positive, as being victims -- that data is here now and shows increased deaths haven't been just to co-morbidities not being treated. Test results are available to those in power. The data is around, it's just not public because - I warrant - politicians can't manipulate the story if the public has the full data.
- djsumdog 6y ago
  We have never had time series data for any other illness, to this granularity. The data is also terribly dirty. The CDC doesn't track flu. It tracks pneumonia deaths, and then retroactively uses surveillance data to estimate the number of deaths from different infections. U Washington also seems to be using entirely different data sets than Johns Hopkins and the metrics for international data is not the same at all. I did a post on some of the issues I found: https://battlepenguin.com/tech/fighting-with-the-data/ https://battlepenguin.com/tech/fighting-with-the-data/
esoterica 6y ago
> That SARS-CoV-2 was in our environment for months longer than thought, that 20% or more of Americans may already have antibodies It's generally a good habit to do a little bit of simple arithmetic to see if the claims you are making pass a basic sanity check. If 20% of Americans already have antibodies, then how come NYC has 10x as many deaths per capita as the rest of the country? Did 200% of New Yorkers get infected?
- djsumdog 6y ago
  Dr. John Ioannidis released the result of his Serology Study in California: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jGUgrEfSgaU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jGUgrEfSgaU We've found earlier cases in the US: https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/22/us/california-deaths-earliest-in-us/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/22/us/california-deaths-earliest... and it was spreading in France earlier than we thought: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijantimicag.2020.106006 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijantimicag.2020.106006 / https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23072956 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23072956 We don't have the testing yet to really get good numbers/samples though. We need more random sampling antibody tests. A number of people claimed they got sick this year after leaving conferences in Las Vegas, but it's all anecdotal without wide scale efforts to just test random people for antibodies in cities in all US states. NYC's numbers could be due to population density (amount of exposure can increase severity in some viruses, including SARS-CoV-2) and some of the increase could just be medical malpractice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CvhTQV5FNUE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CvhTQV5FNUE
  - esoterica 6y ago
    > Dr. John Ioannidis released the result of his Serology Study in California: That study showed that the seroprevalance in Santa Clara was less than 2%. That directly contradicts your earlier suggestion that 20% of the country was infected. https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/04/19/fatal-flaws-in-stanford-study-of-coronavirus-prevalence/ https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/04/19/fatal-flaw... The seroprevalence number was also approximately the same size as the confidence interval on the false positive rate of the antibody test they were using, which means the confidence interval for the denominator of the fatality rate goes all the way down to zero, i.e. the fatality rate estimates are complete garbage. > NYC's numbers could be due to population density (amount of exposure can increase severity in some viruses, including SARS-CoV-2) Other death hotspots include New Orleans, Detroit, rural Georgia, etc. none of which have high population density.
dragonwriter 6y ago
> That SARS-CoV-2 was in our environment for months longer than thought, that 20% or more of Americans may already have antibodies That would be a reasonable conclusion, perhaps, if the curve was flattening somewhat informally, and not specifically in places that have stronger lockdowns. > That there's no evidence social distancing did anything at all There’s reams of evidence in data across the world, and comparing locations in the US, that distancing has a substantial effect. Even most of the nutballs clamoring for radical reopening, like the President and his Republican allies, acknowledge that there is a trade-off in reopening, but argue that the lives to be lost from COVID-19 are a price worth paying for the near-term economic gains.

pbhjpbhj 6y ago

What data do you think will exist by next year that we don't have now? Doctors have recorded those who died with respiratory distress and other Covid19 symptoms, and that tested positive, as being victims -- that data is here now and shows increased deaths haven't been just to co-morbidities not being treated. Test results are available to those in power. The data is around, it's just not public because - I warrant - politicians can't manipulate the story if the public has the full data.

djsumdog 6y ago
We have never had time series data for any other illness, to this granularity. The data is also terribly dirty. The CDC doesn't track flu. It tracks pneumonia deaths, and then retroactively uses surveillance data to estimate the number of deaths from different infections. U Washington also seems to be using entirely different data sets than Johns Hopkins and the metrics for international data is not the same at all. I did a post on some of the issues I found: https://battlepenguin.com/tech/fighting-with-the-data/ https://battlepenguin.com/tech/fighting-with-the-data/

esoterica 6y ago

> That SARS-CoV-2 was in our environment for months longer than thought, that 20% or more of Americans may already have antibodies It's generally a good habit to do a little bit of simple arithmetic to see if the claims you are making pass a basic sanity check. If 20% of Americans already have antibodies, then how come NYC has 10x as many deaths per capita as the rest of the country? Did 200% of New Yorkers get infected?

djsumdog 6y ago
Dr. John Ioannidis released the result of his Serology Study in California: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jGUgrEfSgaU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jGUgrEfSgaU We've found earlier cases in the US: https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/22/us/california-deaths-earliest-in-us/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/22/us/california-deaths-earliest... and it was spreading in France earlier than we thought: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijantimicag.2020.106006 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijantimicag.2020.106006 / https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23072956 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23072956 We don't have the testing yet to really get good numbers/samples though. We need more random sampling antibody tests. A number of people claimed they got sick this year after leaving conferences in Las Vegas, but it's all anecdotal without wide scale efforts to just test random people for antibodies in cities in all US states. NYC's numbers could be due to population density (amount of exposure can increase severity in some viruses, including SARS-CoV-2) and some of the increase could just be medical malpractice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CvhTQV5FNUE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CvhTQV5FNUE
- esoterica 6y ago
  > Dr. John Ioannidis released the result of his Serology Study in California: That study showed that the seroprevalance in Santa Clara was less than 2%. That directly contradicts your earlier suggestion that 20% of the country was infected. https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/04/19/fatal-flaws-in-stanford-study-of-coronavirus-prevalence/ https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/04/19/fatal-flaw... The seroprevalence number was also approximately the same size as the confidence interval on the false positive rate of the antibody test they were using, which means the confidence interval for the denominator of the fatality rate goes all the way down to zero, i.e. the fatality rate estimates are complete garbage. > NYC's numbers could be due to population density (amount of exposure can increase severity in some viruses, including SARS-CoV-2) Other death hotspots include New Orleans, Detroit, rural Georgia, etc. none of which have high population density.

dragonwriter 6y ago

> That SARS-CoV-2 was in our environment for months longer than thought, that 20% or more of Americans may already have antibodies That would be a reasonable conclusion, perhaps, if the curve was flattening somewhat informally, and not specifically in places that have stronger lockdowns. > That there's no evidence social distancing did anything at all There’s reams of evidence in data across the world, and comparing locations in the US, that distancing has a substantial effect. Even most of the nutballs clamoring for radical reopening, like the President and his Republican allies, acknowledge that there is a trade-off in reopening, but argue that the lives to be lost from COVID-19 are a price worth paying for the near-term economic gains.