4 ms·

Of course, this assumes that the testing data is accurate and indications are it may not be. Politico ran something today suggesting quite a few states had inf

by beezle 6y ago

Of course, this assumes that the testing data is accurate and indications are it may not be. Politico ran something today suggesting quite a few states had inflated the number of tests done. Also not clear is whether they are unique tests (ie, multiple tests of the same person only count once)

MR4D 6y ago
I went to look up the accuracy for antibody tests specifically (as opposed to the other test which we've all heard bad things about generally), and I found this [0]. Apparently the antibody tests suck wrt accuracy. [0] - https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cdc-warns-that-half-of-coronavirus-antibody-test-results-are-wrong-2020-05-27/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cdc-warns-that-half-of-coronavi...
- acqq 6y ago
  > Apparently the antibody tests suck wrt accuracy. Here's what I have posted here exactly a month ago, referring to the article from Guardian from April 4th: -- The "false positives" are "especially significant with these antibody tests, so with the low numbers of positives it's extremely important to evaluate if the claimed values are more than noise artifacts of the tests themselves. It is also important to be aware of the scenarios for which the use of the apparent test results is not reasonable. Moreover, here's what happened in the UK a few weeks ago: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/09/uk-government-urged-to-abandon-poor-finger-prick-antibody-tests-coronavirus https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/09/uk-government-... "None of 3.5m home tests ordered have so far been accurate enough to detect coronavirus immunity" UK got 3.5 million(!) unusable antibody tests. https://www.bmj.com/content/369/bmj.m1449 https://www.bmj.com/content/369/bmj.m1449 "John Newton, Public Health England’s director of health improvement, said: "A number of companies were offering us these quick antibody tests, and we were hoping that they’d be fit for purpose, but when they got to test, they all worked but were just not good enough to rely on. “The judgment was made [that] it’s worth taking the time to develop a better antibody test before rolling it out, and that is what the current plan is.” "Newton told the committee that the tests trialled so far had lacked sufficient sensitivity to identify people who had been infected. “We set a clear target for tests to achieve, and none of them frankly were close.”" -- Since then, Roche actually made an antibody test which according to them, in laboratory conditions, doesn't have false positives. I haven't seen the independently done confirmation, but personally, I wouldn't use anything else. There are still a lot of bad antibody tests in circulation. Also, the estimate that the death rate is close to 1% was known since... seems like forever in this times: on Diamond Princess ship there were a lot of old people and the death rate was under 2% so adjusting to the population structure (where there are more younger people than on the ship) it was obvious even then: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coronavirus_pandemic_on_Diamond_Princess https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coronavirus_pandemic_on_D... But it was also obvious that it's something like 10 times more deadly than flu. What was also known is that once the health system is overwhelmed the death rate would be much more than 1%, and that is also what was observed in Italy. And that is the reason for having the goal of "flattening the curve": not allowing to have more cases than the whole system could handle.

by beezle 6y ago

MR4D 6y ago

I went to look up the accuracy for antibody tests specifically (as opposed to the other test which we've all heard bad things about generally), and I found this [0]. Apparently the antibody tests suck wrt accuracy. [0] - https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cdc-warns-that-half-of-coronavirus-antibody-test-results-are-wrong-2020-05-27/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cdc-warns-that-half-of-coronavi...

acqq 6y ago
> Apparently the antibody tests suck wrt accuracy. Here's what I have posted here exactly a month ago, referring to the article from Guardian from April 4th: -- The "false positives" are "especially significant with these antibody tests, so with the low numbers of positives it's extremely important to evaluate if the claimed values are more than noise artifacts of the tests themselves. It is also important to be aware of the scenarios for which the use of the apparent test results is not reasonable. Moreover, here's what happened in the UK a few weeks ago: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/09/uk-government-urged-to-abandon-poor-finger-prick-antibody-tests-coronavirus https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/09/uk-government-... "None of 3.5m home tests ordered have so far been accurate enough to detect coronavirus immunity" UK got 3.5 million(!) unusable antibody tests. https://www.bmj.com/content/369/bmj.m1449 https://www.bmj.com/content/369/bmj.m1449 "John Newton, Public Health England’s director of health improvement, said: "A number of companies were offering us these quick antibody tests, and we were hoping that they’d be fit for purpose, but when they got to test, they all worked but were just not good enough to rely on. “The judgment was made [that] it’s worth taking the time to develop a better antibody test before rolling it out, and that is what the current plan is.” "Newton told the committee that the tests trialled so far had lacked sufficient sensitivity to identify people who had been infected. “We set a clear target for tests to achieve, and none of them frankly were close.”" -- Since then, Roche actually made an antibody test which according to them, in laboratory conditions, doesn't have false positives. I haven't seen the independently done confirmation, but personally, I wouldn't use anything else. There are still a lot of bad antibody tests in circulation. Also, the estimate that the death rate is close to 1% was known since... seems like forever in this times: on Diamond Princess ship there were a lot of old people and the death rate was under 2% so adjusting to the population structure (where there are more younger people than on the ship) it was obvious even then: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coronavirus_pandemic_on_Diamond_Princess https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coronavirus_pandemic_on_D... But it was also obvious that it's something like 10 times more deadly than flu. What was also known is that once the health system is overwhelmed the death rate would be much more than 1%, and that is also what was observed in Italy. And that is the reason for having the goal of "flattening the curve": not allowing to have more cases than the whole system could handle.