7 ms·
Age-specific mortality and immunity patterns of SARS-CoV-2
- andy_ppp 6y agoGiven the article say 5% have had it what can we infer about total deaths in the do nothing/herd immunity strategy?
- iamthemonster 6y agoIf you can wait for two months then just visit https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/ and you will find the results.
- rsfern 6y agoThey are estimating infection rates by combining mortality stats specifically for the younger part of the population and seroprevalence studies. So if you accept the known biases in the seroprevalence studies, and make the (strong, IMO) assumption that an individual’s risk of severe disease is not correlated to behavior that reduced their odds of infection before September (the cutoff in this study), and account for the age distribution in the as yet uninfected population, maybe you could get reasonable ish bounds. I’m skeptical because a change in behavior probably changes relative risk of infection, and I think people with known risk factors are probably more careful on average. Anyways, the first thing to do would be to check such an estimate against data for October and November
- andy_ppp 6y agoI see what you mean here, it makes sense that those at risk didn’t go to illegal raves or BLM protests. Therefore the infection rate could be higher than 5%. My guesstimate from the small sample of people I knew is 10-15% of people lost their smell in late February to early April and some had horrendous symptoms and a few had those symptoms last for months! I wouldn’t say many people I know have been affected by the second wave so who knows.
- throwaway2245 6y agoFrom that stat alone, not very much. - Your best estimate on a do nothing strategy would be that total deaths would be 20x what it currently is, (I'd assume everyone catches covid before herd immunity becomes relevant: here, aiming for herd immunity is a different strategy than 'do nothing') - plus likely a whole bunch more due to overwhelmed health services, likely a large proportion of people needing intensive care would also have died, - plus likely a whole bunch more people would have had a high viral load initial exposure and more likely to have consequential symptoms, - plus likely a whole bunch more, reflecting a likely relatively safe age and risk distribution of people who have caught covid to date.
- jtbayly 6y ago> I'd assume everyone catches covid before herd immunity becomes relevant... That's just not how it works. As the number of immune people (whether through survival, natural immunity or vaccine) in a population increases, the chances of anybody who is contagious spreading the disease begins to decrease. Herd immunity is going to be reached before everybody catches it, no matter what.
- andy_ppp 6y agoYes I read 60-70% is enough for herd immunity.
- marcosdumay 6y agoIt takes weeks before people stop being contagious. That's plenty of time to pass it around to everybody in a "do nothing" scenario. (Of course, that is in a naive model with homogeneous population. If we've learned anything from this pandemic is that the population is heterogeneous enough for breaking those.)
- nradov 6y agoThat is not correct. The vast majority of patients stop being contagious within 10 days of infection. https://www.evms.edu/media/evms_public/departments/internal_medicine/EVMS_Critical_Care_COVID-19_Protocol.pdf https://www.evms.edu/media/evms_public/departments/internal_... Patients may continue have positive PCR test results for weeks, but that doesn't mean they are contagious.
- dboreham 6y agoThe paper doesn't say so, but it seems there may be some process by which a the scenario where there are a large number of simultaneously infected individuals living in close proximity tends to produce worse outcomes in all those individuals.
- jaynetics 6y agoI also came away with this impression. It seems fairly easy to explain, though. There are probably some bottlenecks in the treatment process. E. g. getting everyone to the hospital in time might be challenging if there is a large outbreak in a nursing home, even if there are enough beds and nurses at that hospital.
- dcolkitt 6y agoThere’s pretty decent evidence that viral load is a big determinant of infection severity.
- bamboozled 6y agoThis guy I work with, his mother had it quite badly. He had to care for her in a temporary hospital for almost 3 weeks while she recovered. This was in a pretty poor area in India. He said he saw about 25 people die during his time there. This story either negates or supports your case, but either way , I’d imagine they were exposed to a pretty severe viral load in that time. I didn’t ask about PPE, I doubt he has much. He is fine now AFAIK never really got sick, maybe be was already immune ?
- kgin 6y agoThere are many reports of households where the first person is infected outside the household, but only in passing, gets a low initial exposure, and develops a mild case. But then the subsequent infected people in the household develop much more severe cases because of higher initial exposure in the household.
- cwhiz 6y agoBack of the envelope they are estimating a little under 2 undiagnosed cases for every confirmed case. Putting our “actual” total around 42 million as of today. I have no reason to doubt this particular study but I’ve seen other studies estimating up to 10x actual for every confirmed. It seems there is no great way to know this without some consistent, nationwide, antibody testing effort. Which hasn’t happened and by now may be too late to ever happen.
- snewman 6y agoThe fraction of infections which are diagnosed varies quite a bit by circumstance, e.g. available test capacity. In general I get the impression that 10x was typical early on and 3x may be more typical now.
- shubb 6y agohttps://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M20-3012 https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M20-3012 Metanalysis mostly based on data from the first spike. Looks like about 50% of cases are asymptomatic in the general population, with a higher proportion of asymptomatic cases in younger populations?
- petertodd 6y agoRemember that not everyone with symptoms is going to bother getting tested. In fact, everyone I know who has had possible COVID symptoms in the past few months hasn't bothered to get tested.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 6y agoOn some level I don't really know why you would get tested, except if you're curious. I'm a person in my 30s. If I got covid symptoms, I would warn everyone I've had close or transitive close contact with -- that is, our nanny, my son's tutor, and my son's classroom. But I don't know if I would bother to get tested. How does knowing you have it help? I guess if I was sure I had it it would be nice to get confirmation so that I could have a strong belief I'm immune going forward. But other than that I'm not sure how it helps.
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- superkuh 6y agoEvery single paper on IFR estimation seems to mostly ignore that poorer countries without infrastructure aren't capable of and are not capturing a large fraction of the covid-19 caused deaths. They all show a clear trend of lower IFR in places like Kenya, Peru, etc and significantly higher IFR in places like Switzerland, England, France, Germany, etc. It's not hard to figure out which is closer to reality. The only odd-man out is China, and that's obviously because China kicked out all journalists and started faking numbers back in March and have continued to report falsehoods since.
- s1artibartfast 6y agoI’m not sure that they ignore anything. Most poorer countries have a younger population, and we know that mortality goes up exponentially with age. This is why the IFR is 1/10,000 for someone in their 30s and 1/10 for someone in their 80s
- nradov 6y agoYes that's a factor. On average poorer countries also tend to have lower rates of the co-morbid conditions which increase COVID-19 risk such as obesity, diabetes, hypertension, and vitamin D deficiency.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- rectang 6y agoIFR = "Infection Fatality Ratio" (for those who were unfamiliar with the acronym like me).
- tartoran 6y agoI could guess form the text but was about to look it up so thanks for disambiguating the term here. Wish people would add in parens the meaning of the acronym they use at the first occurence in the text then refer to the acronym only.
- move-on-by 6y agoAs a parent of a 7-month-old, it is very frustrating to see the age range 0-4 years old. Everything I read says children under 1 year is at higher risk, but then all the statistics group that higher-risk age group with the lower risk age group 2-4. How am I supposed to understand the risk to my child when I know the stats are including lower-risk populations? How much higher is the risk for 0-1? If anyone has any insights into the under 1 year age group, I would really appreciate it. My understanding is that a vaccine for children will not be available for some time. I will have to make some decisions about daycare this spring and want to make the most informed decision possible.
- jaynetics 6y agoNumbers for age 0-1: https://www.heritage.org/data-visualizations/public-health/covid-19-deaths-by-age/ https://www.heritage.org/data-visualizations/public-health/c...
- throwaway201103 6y agoNewborns and infants are higher-risk for everything, simply because their immune systems are very immature. There are also minimum ages for all the common childhood vaccines. Not particularly comforting, but something every parent deals with. I'd avoid daycare under age 2 if you can.
- bobberkarl 6y agoI am sick and tired of everyone saying African countries are resisting better on paper because they can't test. During the Ebola, AIDS, Yellow Fever crises/épidémies we did not have the means either... But we could count the bodies. Eg: Gabon is a small country with a pop just under 2M. The capital is 60%+ of that. There are 2 morgues there. All are seeing a bump in deaths, but no unprecedented activity. Something is really happening. There must be a reason why sub-Saharan countries are relatively ok, but everyone is only saying: it's because of poor data. (rant) HN feels like the_donald sometimes. Incredible that such a high number of interesting & intelligent people can stop thinking altogether. (/rant)
- s1artibartfast 6y agoI feel like the answer is obvious. The countries are younger and healthier. Look at the age distrabution of Gabon and compare it to the US or Italy. We know that covid is most deadly to the elderly, with 80+ being 100X more likely to die than someone in their 20s. The entire country of Gabon has <4,000 people over 80! https://www.populationpyramid.net/gabon/2019/ https://www.populationpyramid.net/gabon/2019/ https://www.populationpyramid.net/united-states-of-america/2019/ https://www.populationpyramid.net/united-states-of-america/2... https://www.populationpyramid.net/italy/2019/ https://www.populationpyramid.net/italy/2019/
- jokethrowaway 6y agoIf you lived in an African country and you couldn't handle this flu you would be dead already. Vulnerable people live in rich countries.