https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.10.19.20214494v...
Here’s another recent study showing 95% of former COVID (hospitalized) patients suffered no irreversible damage:
https://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-study-95-of-former-cov...
I personally know two people who have long 'recovered' from Covid but still have no smell, or a reduced sense of smell. Not life threatening or really holding them back from anything, but they say it effects their quality of life more than they expected.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...
And obviously a number of people have been infected since. But just using the 83 million number from the CDC, 2% of that would be 1.6 million people.
How can you possibly believe this, given the seroprevelance data? Every indication is that more than twice this number (some surveys suggesting substantially more even than that) were already infected a few months ago.
Given that effectively nobody was dying from COVID prior to March, and the three giant waves of exponential growth that followed, I have severe doubts about the accuracy of these tests. I have a feeling that if those same tests were ran back in 2018, they would have said the same thing.
That's not quite true. The surveys in that time frame were mostly < 10%. The > 10% surveys came months later.
However, it's certainly possible that these are false positives (particularly the wastewater studies).
However I'm not sure that this particular observation is a good basis for that conclusion. It takes a substantial mass of cases to produce excess population-level mortality, which is what gets our attention.
Since we weren't testing for cases prior to March 2020, we really don't know how many people died while infected with the virus. Now of course we count nearly every such case meticulously.
It's possible that it was fairly widespread, and some people were dying (and perhaps being reported to ILInet, etc), but not enough to cause a notable increase in population-level mortality for anybody to notice.
There is ongoing conjecture on this point all over expert circles.
2. Mortality rates were not above the baseline prior to March.
3. We know that the virus spreads like wildfire when no quarantine measures are taken. No quarantine measures were taken at any point prior to March.
4. The growth in known cases and above-baseline mortality closely matches, starting in March.
It's impossible for there to have been a significant presence of the virus in the United States at the start of 2020, as claimed by seroprevalence data, because within a matter of weeks it would have infected a large enough percentage of the population to be clearly visible in the above-baseline mortality rates, and hospitalization rates. A large percentage of people who catch COVID end up going to the hospital, or the morgue when they are unable to breathe. In a pre-quarantine/lockdown world, they also tend to get everyone around them, as well as a whole bundle of unrelated people sick in the process.
Either the seroprevalence data is wrong, or the virus was somehow uncontagious or unlethal, until March, when all across the country, all at once, somehow, it turned into something that was quite contagious, and quite lethal.
When your measurements claim an invisible, inaudible, imperceptible phenomena that has no physical influence on any other object, the prudent scientific conclusion is that your measurements are broken.
This is only true if we presume that it was equally spread across risk strata. But it's also possible that it didn't make its way from younger travelers into the higher risk stratum in sufficient measure to start causing significant mortality for weeks.
> A large percentage of people who catch COVID end up going to the hospital
This is simply false, unless your definition of 'large' is a fraction of a percent.
> In a pre-quarantine/lockdown world, they also tend to get everyone around them, as well as a whole bundle of unrelated people sick in the process.
This is true of a lockdown world as well; in fact lockdowns don't appear to be negatively correlated with population-level mortality at all, spare a very few examples, all of which are island nations which have also maintained various travel bans and similar measures. But in the USA and mainland Europe, lockdown states have fared quite horribly. I can't tell you how happy I am to be in Florida (no lockdown, mortality substantially below average, risk-adjusted mortality notably and incredibly low) instead of my home state of NY (intense lockdowns and a resulting bloodbath).
I don't see any reason to believe that widespread presence of the virus would have been noticed as anything but an uptick in ILInet (which of course we did see) until it got into long-term care homes and other places with high concentrations of at-risk populations.
> Either the seroprevalence data is wrong
Again, this is possible; I'm not saying it's not. But it has been reproduced over 20 times now, with different tests, some of which appear to have a perfect record of selectivity and also good record of sensitivity.
> or the virus was somehow uncontagious or unlethal, until March, when all across the country, all at once, somehow, it turned into something that was quite contagious, and quite lethal.
In the vast majority of the population, the virus isn't particularly lethal. That's really the discussion here - whether it might have spread more widely through the lower-risk strata prior to widespread infections among the vulnerable.
It may not have been equally spread across risk strata, but in a pre-lockdown world, even if you are in a low-risk group, you have social contact with people who are in high-risk groups, through public transit, grocery stores, services that you visit, relatives that you visit, hospital waiting rooms, urgent care waiting rooms, hospital wards where doctors don't wash their hands as frequently as they should, workplaces, and the list goes on.
Is it possible for a small group of people (low thousands) to have had the virus across the country, when the official count was in the tens and low hundreds? Absolutely! I can see this happening. It seems to fit with the pattern of infections flaring up all across the country at roughly the same time.
Was it possible for millions of people to have had the virus (which is what the sero data points to), for over two months, without getting other people sick in a manner that would show up on the statistics? That is an incredibly strong claim, with only one data point that supports it, and a lot of data points that oppose it.
With the benefit of hindsight, it is clear that the sero data was not a good predictor of the future in March of 2020. What has changed about it, that makes it a good predictor of the future in March of 2021?
> I can't tell you how happy I am to be in Florida (no lockdown, mortality substantially below average, risk-adjusted mortality notably and incredibly low) instead of my home state of NY (intense lockdowns and a resulting bloodbath).
If Florida had the population density of NYC, with people of all demographics sharing the same public transit infrastructure, sharing the same elevators, packing the same grocery stores, it would be a graveyard. You're ignoring all sorts of conflating factors, by pointing at two vastly different datasets, and concluding that because one had a lockdown, and the other one didn't, lockdowns don't work.
Counterpoint - Washington state has had lockdowns, and despite having a similar population density to Florida, has half the death rate of it. To the surprise of absolutely nobody, death rates are much higher in counties with lower compliance rates (Yakima versus Pierce, for example...)
Oh, and when lockdowns would get relaxed, three weeks later, like clockwork, infections and deaths would spike up.
It's an infectious airborne disease. The more people that carriers are in close quarters with, the faster it spreads. Reducing the number of people the average person is in contact with, healthy, or otherwise, reduces it's rate spread. I am not sure why this is still controversial in 2021.
You're arguing with an imaginary friend. Nobody is making the points you are refuting.
The reason that lockdowns have so spectacularly failed isn't that there's some mystery about the nature of spread of respiratory pathogens; it's that lockdowns don't actually achieve any of the conditions that prevent spread except for people wealthy enough to have the means to isolate (and there's no reason to believe they'd refrain from isolating even in the absence of a state mandate).
Instead, lockdowns shift risk onto poor people ("essential workers") without regard to their level of risk. So, instead of a more acute spread occurring through the lower risk strata, we get a more acute spread occurring through the less affluent economic strata.
I don't have sufficient knowledge to concur with or refute your assertion that the sociological conditions of the high-risk stratum (ie, sharing public transit, etc) make the results of the dozens of seroprevalence surveys implausible. However, I do note that people who study these things for a living are saying that it is plausible.
That said, I have some doubts about the 2% number. Estimates vary widely from about 2% as the lowest plausible number I've seen to about 10% at the highest plausible number. If it's really 10% of infected people reporting long-term symptoms, that changes things a bit. Also note that pretty much all of the sources are preprints or otherwise not peer reviewed articles -- an actual rigorous investigation is very welcome here, and hopefully that is what the $1B from NIH will buy.
Uh, what? The WHO updated their guidelines a month and a half ago because PCR tests were being misused: Too many cycles and not taking symptoms into account was resulting in too many false positives.
https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-who-instruction...
This is right-wing conspiracy theory.
>the tests were not being used in compliance with instructions
This is science.
The part that primarily caught my eye, which isn't what Reuters is attempting to debunk:
> Where test results do not correspond with the clinical presentation, a new specimen should be taken and retested using the same or different NAT technology.
"clinical presentation" - in other words, the symptoms. This advice runs contrary to the entire past year, where a single positive test in an asymptomatic person has counted as a case. This alone is enough to inflate the numbers, without even taking PCR cycles into account.
And Reuters ends up just barely short of confirming the part about PCR cycles anyway:
> ”The WHO are saying that if the manufacturer has defined a value but you could if you chose to adjust that setting, please don’t - stick to what the manufacturer has stated because they have done the earlier work to determine the best value for that threshold,” Mackay said.
Labs using too high a threshold has been a concern for about half a year: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/29/health/coronavirus-testin... (And note the numbers in this article, almost all in the range of 33-40 cycles - I recall on rare occasion seeing higher reported elsewhere, around 45 and 50 cycles)
Luckily a long haul isn't always a forever haul, we can hope.
- 30 gallon plastic bin (look for one with flat sides, not a "heavy duty" model with ridges along the side -- if your cat is a side-pee-er, this will be difficult to clean).
- Cut a hole in the side with a utility (aka x-acto) knife, 9 inches from the bottom.
- Fill with 3.5-4 inches of unscented, clumping litter. I've tried Dr Elsey's and World's Best, and prefer the former, which I found clumps better; I believe other clay-based litters are equivalent to it.
- Buy a litter-lifter, it's the best scoop, hands down. After I tried it the first time, I actually placed a bulk order (25 scoops) so that I have a guaranteed lifetime supply (and for gifts), because I never want to use another scoop.
- Clean the litter box at least once per day. I know this sounds like a lot, but it's actually not -- with the scoop above, it takes me ~10 seconds per "item" (pee ball or poop cluster) you scoop out (unless your cat is a side-pee-er), plus maybe 30s moving the litter around to find the items and even out the litter at the end. (I've timed this; in total it's around 1 minute if I scoop once per day).
Info is sourced from https://catinfo.org (specifically https://catinfo.org/the-litter-box-from-your-cats-point-of-v... and https://catinfo.org/making-cat-food/#Constipation ) and verified by personal experience.
But the total number of global cases is over 100,000,000 and rising. If something impacts 1-2% of people, that's still millions of people.
This research could also benefit millions more people suffering from generic post-viral fatigue disorders, which were a problem even before COVID.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.16.21249950v...
And the authors do not claim that any of the sequelae were caused by COVID.
> the authors do not claim that any of the sequelae were caused by COVID
Because a strong causality claim like you're asking for is impossible without perfect randomized controls which would be unethical.
> The estimated incidence of neurological or psychiatric sequelae at 6 months was 33.6%, with 12.8% receiving their first such diagnosis [thus 20.8% pre-existing]
From table 1:
33.6% of patients had any sequelae
24% had psychiatric disorders (only 8.6% for the first time)
6.6% had substance misuse (only 1.9% for the first time)
5.4% had insomnia (only 2.5% for the first time).
No other condition was over 3%. (Numbers add up to more than 33.6% (12.8%) because some patients had multiple conditions.)
So it looks like almost 2/3rds of the figure was preexisting conditions.
> Because a strong causality claim like you're asking for is impossible without perfect randomized controls which would be unethical.
I'm not asking for a strong causality claim, merely some effort to restrict the numbers to conditions that might plausibly have been caused by COVID.
> I'm not asking for a strong causality claim, merely some effort to restrict the numbers to conditions that might plausibly have been caused by COVID.
They propensity score match against people who had the flu during lockdown
> They propensity score match against people who had the flu during lockdown
Any kind of stress can aggravate psychiatric disorders, substance misuse, and insomnia, and having COVID is surely more stressful than having the flu.
That's not the same thing as COVID causing the illness.
> The study, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, included patients from ages 18 to 86 in light, moderate and serious condition.
(I tried to find the actual study to see if they had a breakdown but couldn't find it)
And frankly I'd say a study which shows that 94% of COVID patients still had symptoms after 3 months and 5% had symptoms after 6 months is actually not super positive news.
LONG COVID PATIENTS SAY THEY FEEL BETTER AFTER GETTING VACCINATED
https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/2/22308965/covid-vaccine-sho...
Public interest in the putatively psychosomatic Morgellons disease spiked after Joni Mitchell said she had it. There was an outpouring of support for Mitchell, and criticism of Big Pharma, the government, and the media for not treating Morgellons with more gravity.
Also, "placebo effect" is real. "Reversion to the mean" is also real.
None of those explanations are "psychosomatic".
Take the group off the drug and survey them in 30-90 days for long-COVID symptoms.
You could also play around with control groups, for example perhaps one control group is asked not to watch or read any news programming related to COVID. I think the results would be revealing.
They have no known mechanism of action when there are no recognized antigens. If they do, that’s new science, and applying Sagan’s Criterion: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
It's actually surprising that percentage is so small in America.
Would be interesting to cross-reference "long Covid" stats in America with other countries.
Maybe the real pandemic is how unhealthy Americans are.
80% of the population is below the age of 55. A person in the below age 55 group has more of a chance of dying of a car accident than they do of Covid.
That's not anecdotal.
Meanwhile when the eviction moratorium ends this month tens of thousands of people are about to be homeless.
40% of all money in the money supply has been printed in the past year, building supplies are already up by two to four times and are starting to show signs of inflation. America just went 1.9 trillion dollars more into debt. Tens of thousands of small businesses have closed and thier business has been absorbed by large companies so inequality increased.
The price we're about to pay for this is going to be significant.
It's probably going to be poor people and future generations that pay though. #yolo
When first round PPP money was available, the businesses that got it were those that could pull all their info together on a moments notice and jam out an application with supporting material quickly (like literally within hours of finding a bank taking apps) - P&L statements, tax returns, payroll reports, other vital records. I saw business owners who didn't have their stuff together miss out on first round funding because they just weren't able to pull that off quickly enough. It was a land grab and for some it was an early make-or-break moment.
Businesses that were set up from the beginning to treat their offices as "disposable" from a BC/DR perspective were a-okay switching to remote work. As in - if you were planning to be able to continue work if an asteroid hit your building, you were fine with the WFH shift. Mostly this meant very asset-light approach to infrastructure, cloud services, laptops, etc.
Restaurants that could drop ready cash (savings) on outdoor accommodations (tents, heaters, etc) were more likely to maintain a revenue stream, assuming they had land or city-granted street space to set that up.
That last point though - I've seen some businesses leverage political connections to get special permitting, wealthier business owners of course were better positioned innately. The lockdowns disproportionately impacted businesses - like the established and wealthy (read large chains, primarily) were in a far better spot, while the ones already struggling to survive (locally owned) were not.
One aspect of the devastation that may not be fully appreciated is that locally owned small businesses don't necessarily just "come back". Many business owners are of an age where they are hanging up their spurs rather than going through another round of creation and growth. It takes a special kind of person (e.g. highly risk tolerant) to step out of the corporate employment world and have a go on your own, and I think the market lost a sizable quantity of those people over the last year, along with the jobs they provided, who just aren't anxious to have another go at it again.
I see a lot of people talking about inflation concerns. I don't feel I know enough about that to predict one way or another. I do see the job market starting to bounce back a bit where I live, dining rooms starting to fill up again.
To some degree I'm going to miss the society the pandemic created - people walking their neighborhoods more, meeting their neighbors, generally being more patient with each other, empty middle seats on airlines, people less likely to sneeze on the vegetables at the grocery store, more attention to sanitation, less traffic. Ah well.
Muscles != Health or good immune system.
Do you really base your conclusions on a sample size as small as a couple of UFC fighters claiming they're sick? You should really improve your statistical reasoning.
If you want science and actual statistics.. You have more of a chance of dying of a car accident then of Covid if you're under the age of 55.
Under the age of 55 compromises 80% of the American population.