But how much of the US’s growth is due to us finally having some (albeit not enough) testing?
Clearly something completely different is going on there than in many other countries, and it seems they have an extremely effective and well organised testing system. They're testing about 160,000 people a week. In comparison, the UK to date has only tested around 50,000 people in total so no wonder our case numbers are far lower, even though we have double the number of deaths.
So Germany is an outlier, but it just goes to show even for other countries you can't just compare the curves and draw any definitive conclusions without also looking at the testing regime. This is where the experts with their detailed population models and simulation tools come in.
Also there is the purely anecdotal hypothesis of a cultural difference between for example Italy, Spain and Germany. In the southern countries it seems like older people have quite an active social life compared to Germany.
Take numbers from a region where testing is frequent, say the death rate is 2%. Then scale the numbers in a region with lack of testing to match the 2% death rate.
Not perfect, as there are external factors like hospital capacity/quality and existing population health.
However, it should give a closer approximation of total cases where politicians fail to provide adequate testing.
Do you have any statistics pointing to obesity as an increased risk factor for a respritory disease?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0M4kbPDHGR0&feature=youtu.be... turn on google auto translate
TLDR: Any comorbidities present at the time of death are reported as the main culprit. In other news https://www.thelancet.com/action/showPdf?pii=S0140-6736(20)3... Table 2: Treatments and outcomes. Sepsis 100%, Respiratory failure 98%. There you go, nobody dies from the virus alone, problem solved, 20x less deaths than comparable Spain.
I keep asking people about this because I'd for sure would like to know if it were happening, but the only two sources I've seen sounded like speculation by Italian officials that at least as absolute as it is reported in other languages does not match the actual reporting here as far as I can tell.
Look for ILI (Influenza-like Illness) stats which were appreciably higher in January. The obvious inference is that many had Covid-19 before it was recognised as such.
This might be a good thing.
I know a person who back in January acquired something like pneumonia and a bad fever, went to the hospital for awhile and tests were negative for flu, etc. doctors just didn’t know what it was. The person has COPD however.
But anecdotally I’ve noticed quite a few more colleagues over the last few months out sick “with the flu or something”. No idea.
They’re still only testing people with symptoms. We need a randomizes test and a test for antibodies to have any idea how much it has already spread.
If it’s as contagious as they say and spreads in asymptotic people then why wouldn’t there be a significant population that has acquired and recovered from this? Many probably with very mild symptoms.
I could just be in denial right now as well.
The only places I've seen the first US infection being dated that early are conspiracies on Chinese social media that claim the origin of COVID19 to be the US instead of Wuhan. The only way that theory works is to date the first infection in the US and claim that Americans bought it into China during the Wuhan Military games. That theory is easy enough to debunk with common sense because if the US had COVID first the hospitals would be completed overwhelmed before China's was, but it's not the first time wishful thinking's buried common sense in Chinese history.
I don't know anyone that credibly believes it was in the US in November. We did, however, that something was amiss that early, and if the US had a pandemic response team who's job was to see something like this coming, we could have been getting testing ready since then.
Or the fatality and hospitalization rates have been overestimated due to severity bias.
We know this to be true, actually. We just don’t have good estimates of what the true rates are.
It wouldn’t be shocking at all to find out the virus is already widespread, and only slightly more dangerous than influenza.
Even in Italy, if there is widespread infection, the ~4k dead would reflect a low mortality rate.
In italy in hard hit city, they were unable to cremate people fast enough and army had to move bodies. Influenza does not cause that.
The error bars on CFR estimates run from fractions of a percent to a few percent. In countries that have tested large numbers of people who are not severely ill, the case fatality rates have been at the low end of that range.
This isn’t “shocking to epidemiologists”, it’s shocking only to people who dismiss basic facts and try to use irrelevant distractions (like cremation rates) to incite fear.
Epidemiologists do count with overwhelmed hospitals and services, excess deaths due that that, excess deaths on unrelated heath problems. It not just something they talk about, they have it in their models too. This does not happen with influenza, because it is easier to control. Irrelevant distraction there is Italy or Spain lately.
Epidemiologists do talk also about costs after epidemic ends, in treatment of people who will need care for long.
What amateurs do is to ignore all the above, pick up case fatality ration in well run non-overwhelmed health care system and pretend that is situation same as influenza to feel good.
Not that I have heard of. You’re going to have to cite some evidence here.
(They’re both respiratory viruses with similar R0, so your evidence needs to be pretty extraordinary to be convincing.)
Especially asymtomatic. You’d not be coughing or sneezing more than usual which must have some effect.
Just a thought. No one seems to have mentioned this idea.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/10/us/coronavirus-testing-de...
Because all the effects are limited by the time it takes for them to happen. We know the speed of growth, it's much faster than the expected recovery times. From all known COVID-19 cases the number of recovered are still dominated by the recovered in China.
China: reported cases: 81,008
dead: 3,255
recovered: 71,740
Whole world: reported cases: 282,395
dead: 11,822
recovered: 93,189
That’s exactly what happened to my dad in February.
What are you referring to? You don’t think the virus is already much more widespread in the US than currently reported numbers? I’m just making the observation that perhaps the large increases in US cases are more indicative of confirmation of already existing cases rather than necessarily being _new_ cases.
I don’t think that’s crazy at all. We had our first case sometime in January, and only until very very recently have we had any significant travel restrictions. It’s very contagious and for a significant number of people there are no real symptoms, or if there are, nothing life threatening. I don’t think it’s crazy at all that it’s been working it’s way around the US population for months.
Maybe to put it another way, if we could instantly test al 300+M Americans right this instant, would you be surprised if say 20M or so tested positive or had had it?
Yes, I would be very surprised. Given what we know about severity distribution that means 2M hospitalizations and ~200K-1M ICU cases that we somehow missed.
See table at bottom.