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Comment by timkam | Hacker News Reader

Isn't this the report of the case study that was discussed with much controversy in German media, in particular because the researchers hired a high-profile marketing agency for promotion and held a press conference together with the prime minister of the federal state (NRW) before subjecting the findings to the scrutiny of the scientific community?

Edit: link to newspaper article (German): https://www.sueddeutsche.de/gesundheit/heinsberg-studie-coro... Note that Gangelt is a municipality in the Heinsberg district, so the article and the report refer to the same study by different names.

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However, the "controversy" has been overstated by the German media as well. Drosten, virologist who has been cited as one of the critics, called the Gangelt/Heinsberg study "very solid and robust" just yesterday: https://www.zdf.de/politik/maybrit-illner/christian-drosten-...

Particulary, the death rate will be close to the estimate.

He also said that "..the data on the German town are definitely not representative for the country".

https://twitter.com/c_drosten/status/1251034050883657729

The thing is that it's simply not exactly stated what kind of population they tested. Whether they were representative of that town or the German population. Of their sample was actually representative of the German population (which I heavily assume since they talked a lot about that) then the results will be quite robust.

How would you create a representative sample for the whole population if all your samples are from a sub-population with a known cluster of cases?

The cluster thing is obviously hard to remove. But the population.. that should be very doable. You'll just have to adjust the people you chose according to the general population. Not sure exactly how that goes down in practice. But in the press conference he stressed multiple times how this was representative and was done in cooperation with statisticians etc.

Problem here comes from the question "representative for what"?

I can easily see this to be representative for the town in question.

But I find it quite obvious that it cannot be representative for the whole country due to the initial difference in exposition.

Yeah well but is that really important? If they nail the same sample age-wise etc and use that to calculate lethality, then that number can be used on the general population, right? The only difference left is the rate of infection. But how many of those died should be the same.

I would guess that the spread of the disease and the rate of infection could be parameters to consider in planning policy for the immediate future. On the other hand, could this result be used to usefully estimate the total values in other regions from the hospitalization numbers?

As far as I've seen it, that response from him was in cases where people tried to simply use the rate of infection measured in Gangelt and apply that to the entirety of Germany. That is obviously invalid as Gangelt had a much larger outbreak than most places.

That doesn't mean that you can't learn anything from this study for the rest of the country, just that you can't extrapolate it naively.

Sure, as does the study. ;-)

Takeaway: death rate is lower than many initially feared. But it is not like we have already 15 % immunity. In reality it is probably around ~1-2% based on the number of deaths.

And the duration of that immunity is subject of much research because it appears to be all over the place depending on how severe you had it.

The controversy was that they presented results before even a preprint was available. Even worse, the presentation was done together with a state governor and the preliminary results were used to push a political agenda, mainly the loosening of the current COVID19 restrictions, although it is very clear that Gangelt is not representative for Germany. The dubious PR firm that heavily publicized the study on social media was just icing on the cake. Prof. Drosten has said for quite some time that he estimates the fatality rate to be well below 1%, so the 0,37% from the study are well within his estimates. The real question is how far we are w.r.t. to "herd immunity", and if even a heavily hit town like Gangelt has only 15%, this means that we are far, far away from it.

I don't think it's fair to call that political. Everyone agrees that the current COVID19 restrictions are extraordinarily costly and should be relaxed the second we're able. If he believes he's found new evidence suggesting it's safer than commonly believed to relax the restrictions, of course he'll be desperate to tell people about it.

I might misread you here but what part of the statements of a politician are not supposed to be political there? The notion that this was based on evidence and marketing the study before it even concluded do not really seem to mix that well. And we're not talking about marketing in terms of a press release that went out to soon or an overeager university press department here, we're talking about a marketing agency campaign including singular topic social media account and sensationalization of the results.

https://www1.wdr.de/nachrichten/landespolitik/heinsberg-prot...

The politicisation of the study has been a sight to follow.

It is bit sad as it seems to be powerful study and given the attention to the subject, publication of priliminary results are perfectly in order.

Yes, lots of controversy about this study. All in all, it’s not too representative after all because of the outbreak in the festival. There’s currently a similar study going on in Munich, which represents a normal bigger city in Germany, which is expected to give more insights.

But the Munich study is still several weeks away. Which is frustrating. If the sky is falling like everyone is saying, intermediate results could be published daily. It's really not a difficult study to take such a test.

And the issue with the festival outbreak is that it skews the demographic distribution?

I think it's also political, Charité vs Uni Bonn and NRW vs Berlin. At the same time both Jens Spahn (central government) and Armin Laschet (local government) are front runners for the Chancellor's position.

Spahn dropped out and supports Laschet as front runner

For now.

Yeah, that's my feeling as well.

They weren't hired from what I heard. But rather personal friends.

Yeah... if you can make Deutsche Glasfaser and Gries Deco Company pay me 30k EUR each, I'm also more than happy to help you as a friend.

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