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Comment by kolanos | Hacker News Reader

Did you watch the video? That is not what they did. What you're describing is a brief anecdote they shared about what they were seeing on the ground. Their statistics are based on state level aggregates for New York and California.

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State level data is collected using the exact same methods. In many places people with symptoms are told to self isolate until they have difficulty breathing etc. This makes state level data a highly biased sample.

There are a few population studies for very specific areas, but no widespread statewide sampling anywhere.

PS: The US has ~50,000 Coronavirus deaths. Assuming a very optimistic mortality rate of 0.5% suggests at most 10 million infections out of 330 million people or 3.3%. A higher mortality rate of say 5% would mean total infections are possibility as low as 0.3% of the US population.

I'm not saying these doctors are correct in their statistical extrapolations. What I am saying is the Kern County anecdote being spread around to discredit them by people who haven't even seen the video are practicing in the disinformation that they accuse these doctors of perpetrating.

Using state level data is exactly like sampling MBA heights. A biased sample is a biased sample.

So, no I don’t see how it’s misinformation.

Given the delay between catching it and dying, a lot of the people who have it and will die from it are not currently counted in your deaths.

This could mean that substantially more Americans have it. (Though on current projections, less than a factor of 2.)

I was including that for my optimistic 0.5%. South Korea with a younger population, good healthcare system far from maximum capacity, and very good but not perfect testing has a CFR of 2.3% and rising. Diamond Princess has 14deaths out of 712cases, while not a representative sample it’s still conformation that a high percentage of even young healthy people need hospitalization.

The biggest question IMO is how much we are undercounting fatalities. NYC lists Confirmed deaths at 11,820 plus Probable deaths at 5,395. They also add: Due to delays in reporting, recent data are incomplete. https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-data.page

Your 'very optimistic mortality rate' makes a number of assumptions about the rate of asymptomatic cases, the population which experiences asymptomatic cases, etc. It ignores data coming out which suggest that interventions like ventilators may be harming more than helping.

Making any assumptions about the mortality rate with the abysmal state of testing in the US and around the world is guesswork.

Making assumptions based on the horrific codebase that's spawned our most cited models should also give anyone in software at least a twinge of anxiety.

Diamond Princess had a slightly older population but healthy population, tested everyone, provided good medical care. They still hit 14 deaths out of 712 infected or ~2% and only had 20% asymptotic cases. South Korea has very good testing, a younger than US population, similar rates of hospitalization to DP and a slightly worse mortality rate likely due to missing some people but having a more at risk population.

The US has an older and sicker population than SK, and in NYC an overworked healthcare system. So, a 1% US mortality rate discounted to 0.5% due to recent infections not having time to die is extremely optimistic. It would also mean testing was only discovering 10% of cases.

PS: Many more people are exposed without having sufficient infections to trigger long term immunity. But, it’s herd immunity or deaths/long term issues we care about making such cases irrelevant as their still at risk.

I watched the videos. Just like many others have said in this thread, the doctors took the percent of people who tested positive for covid and assumed that percent of people overall in the whole state had covid. Then they took the total number of deaths from covid, and divided that number by the population of the state.

It isn't exactly what they did but it is fairly close. They consistently incorrectly extrapolate the covid positive test rate from a biased sample (biased by both the testing guidelines and self-selection) to the general population, not just for their county, but also for California, New York, the United States, Italy, Sweden and Norway.

They then use this to massively misrepresent the lethality of Covid 19.

People will always put their fingers in their ears and not read/watch the source because it is easier to bash someone than to actually do the work that may change your beliefs

The source is gone.

Well, it’s also hard to watch the source video when YouTube goes out of their way to delete it. So here in this very thread, is a great example of the harms of taking down the content. It makes it hard to even have a discussion about its merits.

I don’t understand why YouTube couldn’t leave the video up, and put some kind of warning or interstitial advising of problems with the content. I would have problems with that approach too, but certainly less so than I do with the wholesale deletion of the video.

Anyway, you can find it hosted here: https://www.turnto23.com/news/coronavirus/video-interview-wi...

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