3 ms·

What are you saying? We should continue to make decisions based on the pretend mortality rate and ignore the true one? Of course we "want to know it."

• IgorPartola 6y ago
  I am not against knowledge in any way. More research will only help. What I am saying is that in the people who get sick, the mortality rate is 1-3%. This data does not tell us whether that generalizes to everyone or not because merely having these antibodies does not guarantee that you actually won’t get deathly ill. It could be interpreted that you have full immunity or it could be interpreted that you have a weak immunity to COVID. More research is necessary. However the “pretend mortality rate” you refer to is not a thing. It is 1-3% in people who test positive, which correlates pretty strongly with people who have the disease. Think about it this way: the yearly flu in 2018-2019 had a mortality rate of 1.3-48.7% according to the CDC. The denominator in that was 61,000 or so cases. If you found out that 100,000 additional people were exposed to the flu but had no symptoms and by any definition had no flu illness would that change your outlook on whether the flu vaccine or hand washing is worth it? Or another example: there is surgery which has a mortality rate of 15% due to post surgery infection. Not everybody needs the surgery, only 100 people per year do. Does that mean the rate of mortality here is fake because the denominator should be 7.5 billion? Or should we only count the people who get the disease that necessitates the surgery?
  • mod 6y ago
    > If you found out that 100,000 additional people were exposed to the flu but had no symptoms and by any definition had no flu illness would that change your outlook on whether the flu vaccine or hand washing is worth it? Yes, of course my outlook would change. Not on the binary scale--i wouldn't suddenly think it's not worth it to wash hands-- but I would want to know when deciding on measures. The mortality rate is a specific figure, it's not whatever figure makes your reaction most appropriate. If some people get the virus and have no symptoms, that's an incredibly important piece of the puzzle when deciding how to proceed. Using your exaggerated examples, what if 99% of the population didn't suffer any adverse effects? Wouldn't you reevaluate the current response in light of that?
    • IgorPartola 6y ago
      > If some people get the virus and have no symptoms, that's an incredibly important piece of the puzzle when deciding how to proceed. This study does not tell you that these people had COVID. That's the point: we don't know what this means. All we know, is that we need to study this further. > The mortality rate is a specific figure, it's not whatever figure makes your reaction most appropriate. From Wikipedia: "Mortality rate, or death rate, is a measure of the number of deaths (in general, or due to a specific cause) in a particular population, scaled to the size of that population, per unit of time." What is the "particular population" here is in question. I argue that "people who had the SARS-CoV-2 disease" are the relevant population. That is, people who had symptoms or tested positive after an exposure. This study does not change this because it shows no source of the antibodies: if I inject my COVID-19 antibodies into your arm, it does not mean that you had the disease and therefore should not be counted in the mortality rate, does it? How those antibodies got there is a question yet to be answered but the possible answers range from "those people got a mild case and didn't notice" to "those people developed low level antibodies due to incidental contact with COVID-19" without getting the the illness. Their immune system is not trained well enough to fight off a higher viral load." > Using your exaggerated examples, what if 99% of the population didn't suffer any adverse effects? Wouldn't you reevaluate the current response in light of that? Yes and no. First, this study does not tell me anything regarding suffering adverse effects. But if a future study did, I think the 3 million people that have died so far would have wanted us to take more precautions, not less, just because we, the living, won the antibody lottery. At the end of the day this is a highly infectious + somewhat deadly disease that adds up to one deadly pandemic. If your point is that only another few million will die if we let it run rampant vs all of humanity, I don't disagree with you but urge you to examine what it means to let millions of people die in this case.