Coronavirus clue? Most cases aboard U.S. aircraft carrier are symptom-free
reuters.com
reuters.com
”Roughly 60 percent of the over 600 sailors who tested positive so far have not shown symptoms of COVID-19” — note how “so far” is ambiguous in that sentence. It also states, “The Navy’s testing of the entire 4,800-member crew of the aircraft carrier - which is about 94% complete...”, which seems to indicate nowhere near enough time has elapsed to draw any sort of conclusion.
This paper [1] found that testing of all pregnancy patients in a hospital yielded 34% asymptomatic cases. That number drops to 8% “shortly after discharge”, and could be lower than 8% (Again, no timeframe is stated).
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S258993332...
* were these PCR tests (of active viral RNA presence) or antibody tests (of past infection). It's probably the former, meaning 600 cases is a floor, maybe a low floor, on the total number of infected plus recovered.
* the timeframes of testing, & to what extent testing-windows overlap all those who earlier reported symptoms/concern – & any followup to see who was merely pre-symptomatic.
* the total impact on the crew in terms of deaths and serious cases. (Mentioning 1 recent death and 5 current hospitalizations doesn't reveal how many total hospitalizations, or serious ICU/ventilator cases.)
Maybe some of this is because the Navy is holding back details (possibly for legitimate operational reasons). Maybe these wire reporters are stuck rewriting limited primary material released as someone else's press-release or transcript. But it's frustrating when the obvious next questions haven't even been asked or acknowledged.
Of course, without testing from that period it’s impossible to know.
From some simple calculus, becomes the (a) logistic curve.
In a small population like an aircraft carrier, the virus stops spreading exponentially very quickly.
For a second, I thought you were saying 34% of them didn't have pregnancy symptoms.
https://www.stanforddaily.com/2020/04/04/stanford-researcher...
These tests are better done in highly infected areas like NYC.
The entire point of the study is that we don't have good estimates of the IFR.
Here’s the HN submission for discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22900730
It still feels like the general population is very underexposed to the virus :-/
This does not increase the risk. These tests only test people who had coronavirus. The larger this portion, the more herd immunity there is in the population. It implies that there were a larger than expected number of people who had the virus, at some point in time. But that's a lagging indicator.
Let's wait for the development of specific viral antigen tests.
But back-of-the-envelope calculation gives this: Even if that test was only 95% specific, there would still be a 10% spread of actual positive cases.
Also the people in Gangelt, where that test was carried out, are significantly younger than the average German. Their share of people over 75 is 17% below the national average.
[1] https://www.citypopulation.de/en/germany/census/nordrhein_we...
[2] https://www.citypopulation.de/en/germany/hessen/frankfurt_am...
The rate itself has no time element so it tells you nothing about the number of people in hospital right now and hence isn't very illustrative of how hospitals can be swamped by this disease.
More interestingly (for me at least) is that the mortality rate is dependent on a patient's access to a ventilator. This means if you caught the virus early in the spread of the pandemic your odds of surviving are substantially higher than if you caught it right at the peak of infection.
This is impossible to reflect in a simple global mortality rate and so really paints a different picture of the virus - the death rate in South Korea vs other places really highlights this.
I guess to your point, hospitals are more in this way because the virus is so infectious, rather than it being a universally dangerous disease as may be seen from a higher mortality rate. Remember, a high number of people experience little to no symptoms from catching this.
This variability in symptoms doesn't seem to be as true for other lethal diseases like say malaria or dengue fever
I'd say your odds are best if you catch it some time after the peak. The hospital will be better prepared to prevent infections there and have more experience on how to treat patients best. There may even be some treatment that prevents the worst symptoms.
Also, if you (egoistically) try to get Covid-19 early, you may inadvertently infect others against their will.
The last stat I heard was 40% of USA adults have a pre-existing condition. That's a significant amount of potential hospitalizations.
https://www.sfgate.com/news/medical/article/Some-doctors-mov...
Which is why I am still confused by the ratio of 1:10 that the White House has shown between the death toll under lockdown vs no lockdown.
For the reason above, I would only expect the death rate to double. No lockdown means a lot more people get infected faster. But lockdown still requires to build herd immunity, we are only slowing it down. So the same number of people will get infected ultimately. So either they implied that the lockdown would be permanent until we get a vaccine (at best 2021 Q1), or it completely disregarded what happened after the initial few weeks of lockdown and then the numbers were at best grossly misleading.
Also, this is a “up to now” value, more cases might turn out fatal.
“Only” 7 deaths is furthermore not a good data basis for calculating this number.
Moreover, the report is not even public nor peer reviewed. So I can’t even cite it here. However you find criticism of the study by Prof. Streeck online.
https://www.land.nrw/sites/default/files/asset/document/zwis...
Which is why both of these statement can be true at the same time: this thing is no more dangerous than the flu to an individual if you get it, but it can kill many more people than the flu because the population doesn't have any immunity and many more people will get it.
Infection Fatality Rate is certainly coupled to the number of people that develop severe symptoms, but it's not this number that you need to look at as to why people end up in hospitals.
I don't believe that's true. In countries such as Spain, right now there are about 80k confirmed recoveries and 19k deaths among a universe of 182k confirmed cases.
However, there are strong indications that PCR false negatives can happen quite a lot late during the illness.
Those aren’t re-infections, that's just PCR testing at and around the detection limit.
See these graphs from the Munich cluster in Germany: https://twitter.com/c_drosten/status/1249791222526468099
What they found so far is that some people had lower levels of antibodies than others, but that it did not correlate to how sick they were. It's also not clear at this point that anyone's been re-infected (although it is possible) because it's much more likely they hadn't recovered but had received a false negative test followed by a positive test.
48% asymptomatic initially: https://www.niid.go.jp/niid/en/2019-ncov-e/9407-covid-dp-fe-...
18% asymptomatic retrospectively: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7078829/
Also, 58% of asymptomatic COVID-19 infections still show damage to the lungs on CT: https://appliedradiology.com/articles/study-investigates-dia...
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/a-comic-strip-tour-of-t...
https://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2020/04/16/world/europe/16re...?
I.e. the Netherlands aren't testing much.
A 10x reduction there brings it back to the CFR range we see in countries with bigger testing programs.
I'm not a specialist but have been following this for a while, and have yet to see evidence the IFR for this isnt around 0.5-1% (assuming decent healthcare).
That's what we saw in the Diamond Princess data, and a bunch of other places.
We have a lot of hidden deaths of elderly people who decide not to go through the trauma of an ICU stint and instead decide to die at home.
I don't recall exact numbers but think it was estimated the true death toll is about 50 to 100 percent higher.
These are decisions made in concert with the 'huisarts' (General Practitioner).
Researchers are not stupidly looking at Diamond Princess and getting confused because the population is old.
Rather it's a powerful dataset because it enables us to quantify the asymptomatic people of all ages, because people were tested fairly exhaustively before being allowed leave, regardless of symptoms, and because we've had enough time for many of the cases to play out.
The diamond princess data revealed a large number of asymptomatic cases in China, the absence of which were skewing the detected cases in China much older.
Anyway, you don't need to think anything complicated about correcting for ages, etc
You can just look at the data from the Netherlands where they conclude they have 3% population infection, by looking at the random serological testing, and then look at the number of confirmed deaths they have, and do the very simple math.
It's very hard to do that and then say we're missing say 10x higher numbers of asymptomatic cases all over the place.
This blog post I wrote a while back is Ireland specific but has figures on CFR and IFR I think are still valid, and references to the academic articles I got them from: https://medium.com/@fergal.reid/predicting-the-impact-of-cor...
Be fit. Be young.
We've solved it boys, hit the showers.
Otoh, maybe asymptomatic cases also don't build up immunity so shouldn't really be counted as cases.
We need population testing to get an actual idea of how many people in an area have it. There's likely way more cases nationwide than being reported. In NYC, most asymptomatic/low symptom cases of coronavirus aren't going to be tested until antibody testing later on.
Also a good news actually.
Not really, they are testing a population of only young, healthy and fit individuals with an obesity rate and other conditions absolutely not in line with the general population.
However as https://www.propublica.org/article/what-we-need-to-understan... notes, in other samples about 75% of people who were asymptomatic at the time of the test went on to develop symptoms. So the fact that these sailors are currently asymptomatic does not mean that they will remain so.
See https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/covid-19-what-proportion-are-a... for more on how different data points are all over the place.
AFAIK COVID seems to have some case where people are purely "asymptomatic", but with this current hot topic of symptoms or not, lots of articles are writing about presymptomatic people they assume will be asymptomatic. Confusing.
It's not a big suprise. If you are following news from most countries, once it spread out health authorities stopped testing if you do not have significant symptoms and instead told people to stay home and isolate.
I'm very cautious with these type of studies. Lot of them are not clear in regards to how precise the test is, does it catch other coronaviruses as well, whether they did a follow up study to see if people developed symptoms or even how and when they picked their sample. All of these factors could radically impact the results.
It makes things scary when we lift stay home, it will take again two weeks, and things can get bad quickly over that time.
Similarly, if the results are taking 5-7 days to return, it is entirely possible for new confirmed positives to skyrocket just as actual new infections are tumbling.
> “With regard to COVID-19, we’re learning that stealth in the form of asymptomatic transmission is this adversary’s secret power,” said Rear Admiral Bruce Gillingham, surgeon general of the Navy.
It seems like most everyone keep glossing over the fact that if you have a disease that doubles its infection count every x days, and it takes around x days to show symptoms you would always expect about 50% of infected to be asymptomatic at the time of testing
But death numbers and hospitalization numbers don't lie. Sure, different countries are counting deaths differently, making it hard to compare them to each other, but the trajectories don't lie. And if you look at growth trajectories, no country is experiencing uncontrolled exponential growth at this point: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/covid-daily-deaths-trajec...
If deaths are on a downward trajectory, it means that infections have been on a downward trajectory for weeks. And that's how we can know that it's controlled, without knowing how many have it or have had it, while being asymptomatic.
Compare that to some states in the US, where it's a full 30% positive rate, and it's obvious the testing there isn't sufficient.
(Veneto, Gangelt, Telluride, Iceland, the Diamond Princess, the Theodore Roosevelt)
We really need a cheap and easy test. Probably won't happen for many months. So far only endless promises and lies.
Please note that the reporting on Sweden from outside Sweden is completely bananas. The idea of how Sweden is handling the pandemic, alongside cherry-picked data, is being used to argue for whatever lockdown theory people seem to have.
The facts though are that Sweden is not an outlier in any way shape or form. Compared to other European countries, Sweden is boringly in the middle of the pack, and showing the same trajectories as every other country. Swedes are working from home, isolating themselves, going out less, traveling less, staying home from school, closing non-essential businesses, and washing their hands just like everyone else.
https://spectator.us/covid-antibody-test-german-town-shows-1...
There's also a wide range of symptoms from 102F fever all the way to sp02 dropping below 80, with varying impacts on the health-care infrastructure.
At this point, conserving health infrastructure for normal incidence is as much of a problem (i.e even in the best case outcomes, there will be some cases of "stay at home, never catch the disease, but die from delayed response to a stroke").
If the asymptomatic people get immune, then this might drop the other multiplier of the R0.
Oof, optimism is hard to come by in these times.
That's imprecisely stated. 50% of the people that tested positive were asymptomatic. Most of the people tested, both in Iceland and on the Theodore Roosevelt, have tested negative.
Esper's comments are ridiculous. It's been clear for months that there is some significant degree of asymptomatic spread, it's not new information.
That's not enough to estimate how that affects the spread of the disease however. What's interesting is how contagious {a,pre}symptomatic people are.
They are probably less contagious than people who developed symptoms, but just how much remains to be seen.
This data is not different or new, not even better.
Suppose the doubling time on an aircraft carrier is 5 days. That means half your infections are in the 5 day presymptomatic window.
From what I've gathered, but without any hard data, in non-severe cases (i.e. not needing hospitalization) they can vary from a slight sore throat, dry cough and mild fever, to the same with a high fever and general sense of exhaustion.
The disconnect between the definitions of “mild” as in “passing without hospitalization” and “mild” as in “easy to bear for most people” is part of what grants weight to the message that the new virus is extremely bad even in the mild version.
It could be worth applying the falsifiability check here. What are the chances you could hear a message contradicting this observation?
I’m going to imagine a possible counter-message and its optics. “I was exposed and got sick, symptoms seemed to match up but they were really weak and not enough to get tested”—this would be unlikely to gain any positive attention. On facts it’d be very unspecific by the nature of it, on emotional level it might seem unfair to the suffering of other patients, from social/mass media point of view it’d just not be news- (or share-) worthy at all. Even if this case was much more common, the message has virtually no chances of ever being expressed and heard under current circumstances.
This line of thought, of course, should not lead to a conclusion that the prevailing variation of the virus is really mild. It only points out that the accounts we get the chance to hear may not be enough to judge the general severity of the symptoms.
I see this all the time, on a site that used to be a really good spot for rational discussion.
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0869-5
[2] "we inferred that infectiousness started from 2.3 days (95% CI, 0.8–3.0 days) before symptom onset and peaked at 0.7 days (95% CI, −0.2–2.0 days) before symptom onset "
https://www.medpagetoday.com/infectiousdisease/covid19/85965
Pregnant women basically puts the cap of the upper age at around 40. This disease the virus causes in the body is very much worse for those that are older.
The study tested pregnant women admitted to the hospital to give birth. There are a lot of doctor appointments and lab work to check things in their last trimester. So they could've contracted it through those high risk places or routine contact with health care workers who I would say are also high risk.
Still, the study showed on admission that they were positive so they probably didn't get it from the hospital, unless on admission actually means some time after. That assumes it might be able to be detected so soon into the infect as well. It is a bit strange in that regard that it is such a high number.
That letter cites an article[2], which found that of the 43 pregnancy patients who tested positive, 14 (32.6%) were asymptomatic when admitted. However, 10 of them developed symptoms during their stay in the hospital or shortly after being discharged. It doesn’t say how long they tracked patients, but at most, 4 of the 33 could have been asymptomatic.
IMHO, the letter is confusing at best, but more likely intentionally misleading. FWIW, I probably would have come to the same conclusion had I not spent ~45 minutes digging through citations...
[1] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2009316?cookieSet... [2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S258993332...
1) The main cause of infant death due to coronavirus seems to be complications from early labor and the baby being premature. Also related to hypertension in the mother. But it's only the leading cause due to lack of other causes, not necessarily because it's common.
2) Pregnant women also have a non-standard, somewhat suppressed immune system, since they're basically tolerating a (half-)foreign 9-month infection of sorts. It also explains, as you mention, being vulnerable to various types of infections.
But if one of the causes of death for covid is cytokine storm, which is basically an over-responsive immune system failing to regulate itself, then it makes sense that pregnant women, with an over-regulated immune system, might have less risk from that aspect of the disease.
More info on it if you look at theories on placental development and why women are more susceptible to autoimmune diseases. Pretty fascinating stuff.
The opposite is true for the antibody tests. The false negative rate is around 10% and the false positive rate is also around 10%. So in 100,000 tests, you would expect to miss about 1,000 true positives. But, and this is critical, you would also mistakenly get 1,000 false positives - even if only 1/100,000 people are actually infected!
Next time you see someone claiming 50% asymptomatics. First thing to ask is whether they used PCR. Or if they used an assay with a terrible false positive rate.
Of course if you do things correctly this shouldn’t happen, but if the average pathology lab technician is as skilled as my ex-students and colleagues (and myself) then I would be not be so keen to rule out false positives.
Yes there is a major issue with false negatives, especially when the swab was not performed or stored correctly. RNA is not very stable and it is very easy to destroy all the viral RNA if you are not careful.
Do you have a source, offhand? The problem with asserting any sort of false positive rate is that you need to benchmark against a source of truth. What source of truth are we talking about? A second PCR test? Clinical diagnosis?
If we benchmark against the clinical diagnosis, for example, then clearly this is a huge false positive rate -- most of the patients are clinically diagnosed as negative, which is all this article is saying. Benchmarking against a second test doesn't really tell us much if trace signals are being amplified, or if the laboratory is in any way compromised because of the urgency of the testing.
I think you mean missing 10,000 true positives and getting 10,000 false positives.
i'm afraid the fatality rate caused by basic training, i.e. elderly and severe diabetes/hypertension/etc., may happen to be pretty close to the covid.
Btw, i think the aircraft carrier commander is an outstanding and exceptional guy - he put the lives of his sailors above his career.
Putting everyone on a daily fitness regimen would almost certainly save lives, even outside of our current pandemic. Likewise, if things got bad enough that grocery stores had to close and the national guard / army / gov were called in to deliver daily rations to households, I wonder what kind of effect that'd have on the country's obesity problem long-term, also.
Ignoring the completely dystopic dictatorship and near-apocalyptic context that'd be required for such a scenario, of course.
The 60% asymptomatic percentage is also a lot lower than some of the assumptions flowing around the internet (~90%).
> Still, the case of the Theodore Roosevelt offers a case study for researchers about how the virus spreads asymptomatically in a confined environment among mostly younger adults.
...but they don't mention what the average age is. Presumably someone has the data to produce an interesting scatterplot of age versus symptom severity.
Most people think it was a good call but it also may have compromised the safety of the carrier because now it's known they may be operating under less than perfect condition.
It's pretty clear he was canned by a political appointee for political reasons.
Also, although he was relieved of command, he wasn’t “fired” or “canned” or discharged from the Navy. He will undoubtedly go into an early retirement with a full pension at his current rank of Captain. That doesn’t change the fundamental unfairness of how he’s been treated, but he’s going to be fine. And I think he knew and accepted the consequences of his actions.
And in order to actually act they had to leak it because silently acting on it involves getting a refusal from their commanders and also writing an email. It's monkeys all the way up.
Basically, the military chain of command has ALWAYS really cared about how you handle these things. He violated it, and my military friends generally feel he did the "right" thing, but many also feel he knew what was coming and should take his punishment, because you just don't do it. While, at the same time, our government has shown an increasing desire to centralize authority and cover up for political reasons. So, I can see both sides, for sure. "You should never do that" meets "doing that is the right and moral thing in this environment". Fine.
The guy who called him out basically said a bunch of uncool and undisciplined shit about him, VERY publicly, and had to resign under pressure. He could have kept his job if he had toed the "outside of the chain of command" line and kept his cool. But he couldn't resist running his mouth in exactly the "uncool and outside of the military's expected behavior" manner. Again, the MO of the current administration.
Sources: https://www.businessinsider.com/wuhan-residents-say-chinese-...
https://www.france24.com/en/20200331-stacks-of-urns-in-wuhan...
For comparison, the french air carrier did not leak about the situation even though the same number of soldiers got it
So, it doesn't necessarily ease the risk for demographics already identified as 'at-risk'. If anything, their risk might be understated given the higher infection rate.
this cohort will give us a much better picture of how the virus impacts a totally healthy and young population. as with countless other pieces of evidence, it should also help to put the "it's just a flu bro" falsehood to bed.
Including being "old".
Army, is an activity with lots of health risks, chemicals and strange diseases exposure attached. Not the best choice if you expect to live for one hundred years.
29 out of 33 pregnant women who tested positive at Columbia University Medical in NYC were also asymptomatic:
https://www.medpagetoday.com/infectiousdisease/covid19/85965
With other viruses, pregnant women are typically considered at elevated risk. For example, they had a significantly higher fatality rate with the Spanish Flu. So it's still unclear who is most likely to be asymptomatic based on the data we have so far.
Then scale that up to US population outside N.Y.: 18,0000 deaths / 0,0006 = 3,000,000 infected out of 300,000,000 for an infection rate of... 1%.
Herd immunity takes about 66% to 70%. So: only 65% to 69% to go, or about 200,000 deaths.
Lower the assumed infection rate in NY to anything realistic and it only gets worse. For (still high) 20% you’re looking at a million deaths to achieve herd immunity.
Now, this rests on symptoms being directly caused by higher virus cell counts rather than toxic byproduct cascades of some sort. I'm not sure that's true
All of the bits and pieces are floating around in papers, hopefully they won't be confirmed like everything else that started as errant literature.
This is data that examines among other things the overall death rate irrespective of reported cause.
Regardless, it’s going to be extremely interesting now that countries start doing random serological tests.
I read today about a group of Swedish athletes who visited a competition in Wuhan in October and some developed severe respiratory issues afterwards that couldn’t be diagnosed.
Edit: 5 were tested and 1 was positive which was interpreted as being a later infection. So no October infection.
I guess maybe people doubted it really was that hard to stop or were not paying attention before, but its why its is absolutely critical everyone isolate even without symptoms.
The latter tests whether you have had an infection. The former tests whether you currently have one.
The distinction between presymptomatic and asymptomatic is tricky as well, but is less of an issue with a serological test than a qPCR.
"Human coronavirus NL63 (HCoV-NL63) is a species of coronavirus that was identified in late 2004 in a seven-month-old child with bronchiolitis in the Netherlands.[1] The virus is an enveloped, positive-sense, single-stranded RNA virus which enters its host cell by the ACE2 receptor."
To add, I also wonder whether those with contacts to disease super spreaders (aka toddlers in kindergarten) have better immunity against covid-19, just by being previously infected by other coronaviruses. Possibly some currently unknown ones as well.
Purpose
To evaluate the chest CT findings in an environmentally homogeneous cohort from the cruise ship “Diamond Princess” with Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19).
Materials and Methods
This retrospective study comprised 104 cases (mean age, 62 years ± 16, range 25-93) with COVID-19 confirmed with RT-PCR. CT images were reviewed and the CT severity score was calculated for each lobes and the entire lung. CT findings were compared between asymptomatic and symptomatic cases. Results
Of 104 cases, 76 (73%) were asymptomatic, 41 (54%) of which had lung opacities on CT. Other 28 (27%) cases were symptomatic, 22 (79%) of which had abnormal CT findings. Symptomatic cases showed lung opacities and airway abnormalities on CT more frequently than asymptomatic cases [lung opacity; 22 (79%) vs 41 (54%), airway abnormalities; 14 (50%) vs 15 (20%)]. Asymptomatic cases showed more GGO over consolidation (83%), while symptomatic cases more frequently showed consolidation over GGO (41%). The CT severity score was higher in symptomatic cases than asymptomatic cases, particularly in the lower lobes [symptomatic vs asymptomatic cases; right lower lobe: 2 ± 1 (0-4) vs 1 ± 1 (0-4); left lower lobe: 2 ± 1 (0-4) vs 1 ± 1 (0-3); total score: 7 ± 5 (1-17) vs 4 ± 2 (1-11)].
Conclusion
This study documented a high incidence of subclinical CT changes in cases with COVID-19. Compared to symptomatic cases, asymptomatic cases showed more GGO over consolidation and milder extension of disease on CT.
[1] https://pubs.rsna.org/doi/full/10.1148/ryct.2020200110?fbcli...
One with asymptomatic illness very probably (3/4) will get lungs damage.
The countries with the lowest death rates are also the countries that did the most comprehensive testing. Ditto for this aircraft carrier.
Of course governments and outlets are fearmongering lest they be accused of not doing enough, but this thing is way overblown and I fear we'll be living with the consequences for an entire generation.
> All the data points to the fact that coronavirus is more widespread and less deadly than most outlets are reporting
You couldn't be more wrong. There are nurses and doctors working on the front lines dealing with patients, and they're completely and utterly overloaded. Lack of resources. Lack of help from local and federal governments. They're the ones telling us this is way more deadly than it seems.
I mean I'm about 95% sure I already had it. Had literally every single symptom but the local health authority (Alberta, Canada) wouldn't test me. My SO had it worse but again, they wouldn't test her.
Felt like a worse flu + more coughing and shortness of breath. Worse fever. My symptoms were bad for about 3 days, then felt like a cold for about a week, then a cough stuck around another week or two after. My SO had bad symptoms for about a week, was moderately sick for another week and a bit, but her symptoms disappeared pretty quickly afterwards. In either case, because we didn't require hospitalisation, AHS wouldn't test us.
Anyhow, there's a massive body of evidence that there's many times more people infected than confirmed cases. Are you disputing that? Do you actually think there is no one infected other than confirmed cases?
Our health authority, until a few days ago, wouldn't test anyone that wasn't a severe case or an at-risk group... You could literally have every single symptom and they'd simply tell you to stay home. Now they've only expanded testing because there's way less hospitalisations than their models predicted...
Edit
> There are nurses and doctors working on the front lines dealing with patients, and they're completely and utterly overloaded. Lack of resources. Lack of help from local and federal governments.
Maybe that's a failing of your health care system? In Canada hospitalisation rates are way less than predicted. Our province also gave away a bunch of PPE because it doesn't appear as though they'll get used.
Edit 2 - described more symptoms
1) many times more people infected than confirmed cases
2) many times more dangerous than the flu
to both be true.
Let me guess - these are the predictions that were made before the social isolation actions were taken? Its the Y2K hoax all over again?
I get being frustrated at lockdown but your reasoning sounds motivated to me.
We need to inoculate ourselves from this argument because we are about to see it everywhere. Confirmation bias par excellence
Why would the ratio of, say, cases in NY vs Oklahoma vs. Japan stay constant? Just because? Clean living?
I don't have expertise or authoritative predictions, I'm just saying that graphs are all over the place and practically everywhere has historical data with a different shape, and the end state/equilibrium is not know, except apparently, tentatively, for China and South Korea.
I think there have been eight cases in my entire county, which has three hospitals.
Looks like they are catching up from 2 years of mild flu seasons.
Tons of jobs and wealth are being destroyed, governments are issuing tons of debt and expanding the money supply, people need to believe they're saving millions of lives.
* Sailors are not in any way representative of the general population.
* Sailors in the US Navy are notoriously overworked and there is a strong culture of working when sick. So we're they actually asymptomatic or did they report for work shivering and sweating and semi delerious?
It is quite possible the virus is not nearly as dangerous and lethal as people fear. If the young have nothing to worry about the prospects are pretty good.
The best way to reach herd immunity is to have lots of immune people around you.
Italy posts a weekly pdf analysing the demographics of their deceased: https://www.epicentro.iss.it/en/coronavirus/bollettino/Repor...
Not a single death of anyone between 10-19 and only one death under 10. 7 in their 20s. Those are statistically minuscule numbers considering Italy has over 22k deaths and over 168k confirmed positives.
This paragraph is also quite interesting:
"As of April 13th, 217 out of the 18,641 (1.2%) positive SARS-CoV-2 patients under the age of 50 died. In particular, 47 of these were less than 40 years (32 men and 15 women), age range between 5 and 39 years. For 6 patients under the age of 40 years no clinical information is available; the remaining 33 had serious pre-existing pathologies (cardiovascular, renal, psychiatric pathologies, diabetes, obesity) and 8 had no major pathologies."
It's useful data, to be sure, but it also highlights that the disease can be really dangerous for people outside certain groups.
> The best way to reach herd immunity is to have lots of immune people around you.
It's not at all clear yet that recovering from COVID-19 confers any lasting immunity.
Coronaviruses aren't new...
And to your point, many forms of the "common cold" are caused by coronaviruses, and it's not like herd immunity is a thing there.
if you knew someone is unaffected getting exposed is not such a bad outcome.
Whereas being still deadlier than the combination of all wolves, dogs, crocodiles, hippos, lions, tigers, elephants, sharks, spiders and all known venomous snakes in the planet...
Any serial killer wannabee would kill for having the same results in just three months
considering that we have killed and exterminated most of the wolves, crocs, lions, hippos etc
Most people that go to corona's infection parties would surely remain quiet at house if there was a Lion sitting at their door.
[1] https://www.n-tv.de/wissen/Heinsberg-Studie-entraetselt-Coro...
[1] https://www1.wdr.de/nachrichten/offene-fragen-heinsberg-stud...
The Heinsberg study isn't the only source pointing to this. Almost a month ago the NYT also ran a story on randomly tested Iranian airplane passengers which suggested that as of that time there may already have been 500k-5mil infections in the country.
https://www.straitstimes.com/world/europe/dutch-study-sugges...
Also, here's are actual estimations of R0: http://www.dkriesel.com/corona
The reporting we're seeing is CFR, not mortality rate. They are very different things.
Mortality rate is the number of deaths caused by a disease.
CFR (Case Fatality Rate) is the total number of deaths by those diagnosed with a disease.
They are very different numbers, and have very different meaning for different analysis and methodologies.
Saying that that virus has killed .1% of NYC's population is inaccurate.
> We don't know how many people tested positive.
Both of those are in the article.
There are probably some people who are overweight to a varying degree, but again people who get overweight and don’t get back within standards get removed from the Navy.
That said, soldiers everywhere are young and healthy , and usually vaccinated extra
I don't know much about this kind of thing, but isn't the most important word in that sentence "sailors"? I would think people living on an aircraft carrier are, on average, way different in many major ways than the average American. So it seems like making any kinds of assumptions based on this wouldn't be super reliable.
Language evolves. Computers used to be people, my cellular telephone rarely conveys my voice, my laptop seldom touches my lap, I virtually never write anything at my desk.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_(job_description) https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/telephone#Etymology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desk#Etymology
And it’s capitalized.
1) Being overweight is a major risk-factor for requiring critical care, and most US military folks aren't weight-enabled.
2) Being older is another risk factor. Also, most US military folks aren't well-aged either, typically in their 20's-30's.
3) Having type A blood group is a potential risk factor. Type O blood group is a potential protection factor.
4) Being male was a risk-factor for the L-strain. It's possible the military folks caught an S-strain that has less gender specificity, but it also may have nothing to do with it.
5) SARS-CoV-2 as a species maybe drifting genetically towards more communicability but less virulence. H1N1, HIV and others have also shown this pattern.
6) COVID-19 may not be best helped with non/invasive high-pressure ventilation that causes extreme barotrauma. In fact, it may not even be the same as previous instances of ARDS.
7) It's possible they were exposed to a variant of one of the newer genomes of S-strain that goes up to 78% "asymptomatic" community spread.
8) "Asymptomatic" means subclinical in terms of manifested, obvious symptoms. There is still the real possibility of internal organ damage regardless. Only a vaccine will be able to end this threat.
This is not true for either of those diseases.
To be honest, I think it was all over the Bay Area in late December, Early January (when I'm pretty sure I had it) and Feb.
https://www.who.int/news-room/detail/08-04-2020-who-timeline...
In January I fell extremely ill, covid symptoms, including lower right lung pneumonia.
Today I tested negative for covid and antibodies. It seems to have been just a coincidence with a bad viral season.
I genuinely don't understand the desire on the part of so many people to... just not believe the relatively obvious (but still not remotely certain) fact that this is a very serious disease with an unmitigated doubling rate somewhere around 5 days and with somewhere in the realm of a 1% CFR. Really, the data matches that very well.
Certainly there is room for lots of uncertainty, but if your policy desires demand the invention of a second strain and whatnot... maybe it's time to revisit your priors?
I basically figured since my symptoms aligned 100%, and also since I live and work near the largest casino in the Bay Area (which is a hub for tons of international travelers and people from SF Chinatown) that Corona was circulating around Wuhan in Nov, and made it to the Bay Area by December, and I caught it early Jan.
I still think that's a possibility, but it does seem like it would have made it to Seattle before mid-to-late February in that scenario.
Anyway, thx for the info.
"In an open letter to the authorities in the Tuscany region,1 Romagnani wrote that the great majority of people infected with covid-19—50-75%—were asymptomatic, but represented “a formidable source” of contagion."
In the same report was another interesting paragraph as well:
He noted that Romagnani’s findings appeared to contradict a WHO report based on covid-19 in China.2 This suggested that “the proportion of truly asymptomatic infections is unclear but appears to be relatively rare and does not appear to be a major driver of transmission.”
edit: really, downvoted? Because of the mentioning of China?