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Comment by nprz | Hacker News Reader

I mean it will continue to spread until that percent of the of the population is infected. Containment is not possible. So right now it's a balancing act of opening up the economy and preventing an explosive outbreak. The hope is a vaccine will be created soon and a large proportion of the population will gain immunity through a vaccine rather than just naturally contracting the virus.

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Yes. Those restrictions were from the time we were thinking the virus is more deadly than this (1-2% IFR).

Now with more publications, data suggests an IFR of 0.1-0.6%. Which is pretty low and does not worth crashing the economy.

This does not mean vulnerable people has to pay the price no. It is trade off. We have to reopen and go back to normal, while helping vulnerable people.

Even some paper suggest far more infections than we thought.

The IFR is proving to be ~1%.

For 0.1-0.6% to be true, 50-100% of NYC would have to have gotten infected with COVID-19...

IFR is not a fixed value and is affected by many things. For example, intial viral load may be higher in NYC than many other places, vitamin D levels, air pollution, etc. There is no single IFR for any disease.

Yes, IFR is not a fixed value. But a range (0.1-0.6%) was provided by the person I was responding to. Even assuming NYC hit the top of the range of IFRs (which seems questionable given that NYC isn't a particularly old city), one would need an infection rate of 50%, which contradicts serology studies that turned out to be half that.

IFR in other locations (e.g. small towns in Europe where blood tests show widespread exposure) has also consistently come in at roughly 1%.

The data you are putting out there is completely wrong.

You can check this subreddit for publications: https://www.reddit.com/r/COVID19/

All most all the publications from the past 2 months show an IFR if 0.1-0.6 or at most 0.8%.

Searched for IFR estimates there and grabbed a few sample calculations: https://www.reddit.com/r/COVID19/comments/gw5l4q/serology_fr... https://www.reddit.com/r/COVID19/comments/g6035k/new_serolog... https://www.reddit.com/r/COVID19/comments/gnbpkk/antibody_re... https://www.reddit.com/r/COVID19/comments/gnbpkk/antibody_re...

So, 0.77-1.25% for this range of estimates.

Funny how you cherry picking those.

confirmation bias. Look at the other publications.

To prove that 0.1-0.6% is wrong, one only needs to show a single example that had an IFR > 0.6%. I provided several. You meanwhile have provided none.

And this range of IFR estimates (~0.7-1.1%) is what you tend to see across localities where serological tests result in substantial positive antibody rates. Studies based on low (e.g. <5%) exposure rates aren't that meaningful because false positives can dwarf the true-positives, skewing the results.

> You meanwhile have provided none.

When I say you cherrypick, I am talking about this:

https://www.reddit.com/r/COVID19/comments/g4tqvk/dutch_antib...

And so, so mare which I don’t have time to find one by one right now. Like the study from Finland, or other places.

I don’t have anything to add to this discussion, since this clearly shows you are incapable of research. One other point is there is non negligible amount of people who does not develop antibodies therefore they are not detected in serological tests. I would expect IFR go down.

(You could have find in other publications too:

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.13.20101253v...

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.09.20033357v...

The only required skill required is googling and having open mind.)

“ Iceland, (1st May) reports ten deaths in 1798 patients, CFR. 0.56%. If we assumed 1% of the population (364,000) is infected, then the corresponding IFR would be 10/3640 = 0.3%. Iceland’s test and quarantine measures may have shielded the elderly group, and deaths may still go up as they lag infection by about two weeks.

Iceland’s higher rates of testing, the smaller population, and their ability to ascertain all those with Sars-CoV-2 means they can obtain. an accurate estimate of the CFR and the IFR during the pandemic (most countries will only be able to do this after the pandemic).

Current data from Iceland suggests their IFR is somewhere between 0.3% and 0.56%.” -CEBM

P.S. FYI Iceland has done more test than anybody I think (ratiowise).

I have a suggestion for you: READ MORE!

I don't know where you're getting that IFR figure from. Let's take the UK: 7% of the population have had it[1], and about 60,000 people[2] have died (!). That's 1.3%.

[1]https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-52837593 [2]https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-52976580q

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