That's why I did.
Coronavirus Pandemic (COVID-19) (SARS-CoV-2) [2020]
- Thread starter RDGoodla
- Start date
The earlier link to arstechnica provided some other objections that applied to one or more of the studies, besides specificity. The selection process was frequently not random, meaning people motivated to find out if they had contracted the virus would have sought out the study (California) or included a population with significantly higher exposure risk (mothers making multiple visits to hospitals that had above-average viral risk). Measures to adjust the sample to be more representative of the demographics would have generated more imprecision in an already noisy data set, and may not have been applied appropriately. There were also significant mathematical errors in a number of places, which can cast doubt on the studies that do not provide a full breakdown of their methods but still track the results.
The use of antibody tests in the early part of an epidemic is also fraught since the results are close to the margin of error of the tests, or in the case of the Santa Clara study were within the error bars. It's fine to discount the scenario that they were all false positives, but still dubious to try to extrapolate something definitive from something that has so much overlap with probable failure scenarios for the test.
Many post-epidemic studies using antibody tests are less subject to this because they are after the fact studies on a larger pool that an infection has run through, using tests that have had more vetting. Having more candidates can allow the results to rise above the noise floor to draw at least some inferences from the data, but there's also no pressure to make snap judgments and wide-ranging extrapolations on a phenomenon with the ability to amplify errors exponentially.
Multiple municipalities, nations, and regions have detected excess deaths that conform to an exponential trend in the presence of a novel coronavirus, and various proxies such as hospitalizations, morgue counts, use of additional refrigerated trucks for body transport, and burial rates have gone up. This has all occurred in a fraction of the time of an average flu season, and closer to influenza viruses known for being atypically virulent. If it is not this coronavirus, shouldn't we be tracking what else is causing tens of thousands of excess deaths?
If the infection rate with little to no symptoms is so much greater, why are there so many infection clusters? Why, if in reality there would be 10x-50x or more people than would expected that have been infected, do instances where it's been possible to fully test a sample population like meat plants, congregations, ships, nursing homes, etc, do we get ratios of hospitalizations and deaths so much higher? How does the virus know to be more virulent only when it can be observed?
The US death rate is expected to be an overestimate due to the convalescence period leaving so many unresolved cases, but even with a number of the more modest adjustments the virus would still be significantly worse than an average flu season. The numbers being recorded in the span of weeks indicate something significantly more damaging than an average flu, or it is vastly more contagious to have reached such a wide swath of the population in order to generate the intake numbers it has.
D
Deleted member 13524
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What isn't coronavirus (for which we won't have undeniable proof it has a significantly higher mortality rate than the common flu until reliable serological tests are deployed on a large scale) will be mostly victims of the measures adopted by governments to tackle the pandemic. It's those who:
- Didn't go to the hospital to treat curable diseases because they were afraid of catching the virus;
- Got their surgeries postponed to treat a disease/condition and eventually died of it;
- Committed suicide because they are being forcefully subjected to extreme social isolation and/or lost their job and/or saw their businesses go bankrupt in a month;
- Died victims of domestic abuse, who all of a sudden became imprisoned with their abusers 24/7 for months;
- Died of hunger or malnourishment and/or got homeless because after losing their job they couldn't afford food and/or housing;
- Died of stopping a recurrent medication because they became afraid to leave the house to go to a pharmacy and/or couldn't afford the drugs anymore after losing their jobs;
- Died of the increased criminality generated by both the convenience of the streets now being deserted and the unemployment spike.
The US alone will be looking at over 30M unemployed this week. I hope no one's naive to the point to think this won't make crime rates soar within months, and there are always victims to higher crime rates. Especially in a country where you find a gun in every corner.
At some point we'll have to wonder if the amount of people we're saving with the lock-downs is higher than the victims of the same lock-down.
The biggest differentiator right now is the number of Covid-19 victims are being shouted out by every news outlet every day and night, while the others are so far silent in comparison.
I took that swab test in February and I'm 90% sure that cotton went way further than it needed to, probably for dramatic purposes and/or to fuck with the guy being subjected to it.
It's still damn uncomfortable though.
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lol or it may have gone that deep but you're were too uncomfortable to notice how far it went in from a matter of perspective.
or perhaps it didn't go deep enough and your test in invalidated? or this test went too far and it's invalidated...
questions, questions..
That is all the more reason why I scoffed at some of the "self-test" stations that were talked about being set up in Ohio. It's allegedly supervised by a medical professional or someone with enough training, but I just can't see enough people being comfortable enough to push the swab past the point of discomfort to get correct samples. The swabs they showed didn't even have color-coded sections or a line so the observer could know for absolute certainty if that part was done properly.
D
Deleted member 13524
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I tested positive for H1N1 at the time, so I'm pretty sure it went far enough.
DuckThor Evil
Legend
I had the test done 4 weeks ago, came back negative to my surprise. It went deep and felt somewhat unpleasant, mine lasted only few seconds though.
Apologies if already posted in this thread, but another article about Coronavirus impact being under-reported or not fully realized how far reaching it is.
https://www.ft.com/content/6bd88b7d-3386-4543-b2e9-0d5c6fac846c
https://www.ft.com/content/6bd88b7d-3386-4543-b2e9-0d5c6fac846c
Global coronavirus death toll could be 60% higher than reported
Mortality statistics show 122,000 deaths in excess of normal levels across 14 countries analysed by the FT
The death toll from coronavirus may be almost 60 per cent higher than reported in official counts, according to an FT analysis of overall fatalities during the pandemic in 14 countries.
Mortality statistics show 122,000 deaths in excess of normal levels across these locations, considerably higher than the 77,000 official Covid-19 deaths reported for the same places and time periods.
If the same level of under-reporting observed in these countries was happening worldwide, the global Covid-19 death toll would rise from the current official total of 201,000 to as high as 318,000.
Mortality statistics show 122,000 deaths in excess of normal levels across 14 countries analysed by the FT
The death toll from coronavirus may be almost 60 per cent higher than reported in official counts, according to an FT analysis of overall fatalities during the pandemic in 14 countries.
Mortality statistics show 122,000 deaths in excess of normal levels across these locations, considerably higher than the 77,000 official Covid-19 deaths reported for the same places and time periods.
If the same level of under-reporting observed in these countries was happening worldwide, the global Covid-19 death toll would rise from the current official total of 201,000 to as high as 318,000.
=( brutal.I had the test done 4 weeks ago, came back negative to my surprise. It went deep and felt somewhat unpleasant, mine lasted only few seconds though.
ah man. Sorry you guys had to go through that, it would be entirely unnerving, feel like you're choking but not choking I imagine.
D
Deleted member 13524
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The window to which you can get a positive test even if you're infected can be narrow. For many people with symptoms this window can be just 3 days long.
DuckThor Evil
Legend
Yeah I think I will go take the antibodies test soonish. It would be nice to know for sure.
Excess mortality due to displacement from hospitals is one of the cited fears of allowing local medical resources to be overwhelmed, even if those deaths are not directly attributed to the virus.
There are excess deaths in areas without official declarations of an epidemic, such as some numbers coming out of Jakarta.
Overall death rates in many locales that still had spare hospital capacity have been noted as being higher. Some of this could be from people staying away, but some could be from the virus as well. In the absence of a viral contribution, the psychological reaction of the population that leads to the excess deaths seems to have a similar lag time to match the latent period of the virus. That seems suggestive of a more concrete linking mechanism.
However, we do have sampling events with known clusters. Ships, nursing homes, factories, meat plants, etc. With 60 or more per sample population, with some rising into the hundreds, we can start making statistical measurements of the behavior of the virus. We're not seeing a 50x asymptomatic ratio when a choir of 60 people sees at least 2 deaths and half are hospitalized. Various meat plants are seeing multiple fatalities and dozens sickened out of hundreds of employees on the line--while the necessary ratio of asymptomatic workers for some of these studies wouldn't allow for more than a few of them to even show symptoms.
Why would these known specific clusters not conform to the alleged order of magnitude greater number of asymptomatic people?
It seems like many of these may at some point resolve down to the ~1% range, which is generally consistent in regions whose health systems aren't overwhelmed.
At the upper end of these asymptomatic estimates, why would clusters be detectable at all? To that point, is the assertion that contact tracing employed by countries like South Korea is useless? That starts to happen if only 1/50 or fewer people with the virus are even noticed for the purposes of initiating a trace.
Possible in poorer regions, but their figures are spotty and not the ones being debated with regards to the 10x-50x infection rate claims in western countries.
If people are arguing lockdowns are infeasible for locations that cannot provide sustenance or support, that can be made. Using studies whose error bars are the same size as their results and do not square with the measured behavior of known clusters is associating their position with bad data.
The 1-2 week lag being inferred for the virus and its mortality seems like a poor fit for many medications with a month or multiple months per fill.
Excess criminality is a difficult thing to measure. There are worries of under-reporting in some cities like Miami, where there's been an abrupt drop in homicides.
However, I haven't seen claims of a rise in homicides at the levels of excess mortality, and many of the opportunities for deaths due to violence have been reduced in areas that have prevented large gatherings in drinking establishments.
Social distancing has reduced opportunities for many forms of non-premeditated violence, and non-violent deaths due to workplace injury or traffic accidents have also been reduced. Vehicular deaths are one of the leading causes of mortality in general, so reducing those even slightly can have measurable effects.
For many of these scenarios in modern economies, the near and mid-term levels of disaster are heavily predicated on what policies have been chosen to deal with such disruptions. If the choice is made to not mitigate the impact of recommended actions based on decades of epidemiology study, it's not on the science or even the virus.
The people whose deaths are being evaluated for the death rate have already died prior to this hypothesized crime wave six months from now. The infectiousness and biological effects of the virus wouldn't discriminate on those metrics.
There is a raft of responses and staged opening of less-affected sectors to avoid desperation conditions, and whether authorities or society do not undertake them is a separate question from what the impact would have been from the expected health system overload.
Domestic incidents do appear to be significantly higher. Deaths that have been attributed to violence or unnatural causes thus far haven't been recorded to the level of the excess mortality in areas with significant infection like New York.
There hasn't been evidence that most regions with resources on the order of western countries have reached the point where more people are dying due to the stressors related to lock-downs or the milder safer-at-home or social distancing measures.
I think a rise in murders on the order of tens of thousands of people in the space of a month would make a good news story, if such a rise happened.
A1xLLcqAgt0qc2RyMz0y
Veteran
State of Texas complete COVID-19 data breakdown
https://txdshs.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/ed483ecd702b4298ab01e8b9cafc8b83
Data as of 4/28/2020 @ 12:00 PM:
Total Tests: 300,384 (Up +9,867)
Cases Reported: 26,171 (Up +874)
In Hospitals: 1,682 (Up +119)
Patients Recovered (Estimated*) : 11,786 (Up +616)
Fatalities: 690 (Up +27)
Texas tests per 1M population are 10,772 (Up +354) which places Texas as the 6th worst State. No change from yesterday.
Click this link: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us
and on the page click the Tests / 1M pop column to sort from worst to first
They're using roughly 27.885 million as the population of Texas.
https://txdshs.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/ed483ecd702b4298ab01e8b9cafc8b83
Data as of 4/28/2020 @ 12:00 PM:
Total Tests: 300,384 (Up +9,867)
Cases Reported: 26,171 (Up +874)
In Hospitals: 1,682 (Up +119)
Patients Recovered (Estimated*) : 11,786 (Up +616)
Fatalities: 690 (Up +27)
Texas tests per 1M population are 10,772 (Up +354) which places Texas as the 6th worst State. No change from yesterday.
Click this link: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us
and on the page click the Tests / 1M pop column to sort from worst to first
They're using roughly 27.885 million as the population of Texas.
Health care departments depending on the country and location are under working or completely put into hiatus even when the system is not overwhelmed.
Resources and doctors are transferred to Covid-19 treatments in case of need. Many clinics and other departments are shut down again as a precautionary measure because they are afraid they might get contaminated and thus any patient needing to be treated for any kind of illness will simply not find treatment. Doctors are sent home because of fear they might get contaminated.
A recent case in my area involved someone who had a heart attack and needed heart surgery. The doctors were reluctant to operate. They decided to do a Covid-19 test. They did a few tests. All negative. They operated him. Done another test after. Showed positive. Doctors were removed because of possible contamination. The heart clinic is under-operated now by decision. They dont accept new patients.
Some doctors voiced their anger that departments are shut down in general unable for patients to ask for treatment and their lives are at risk. There are also certainly cases of non-Covid patients with suspected symptoms mixed with Covid-19 patients thus contaminating them.
Resources and doctors are transferred to Covid-19 treatments in case of need. Many clinics and other departments are shut down again as a precautionary measure because they are afraid they might get contaminated and thus any patient needing to be treated for any kind of illness will simply not find treatment. Doctors are sent home because of fear they might get contaminated.
A recent case in my area involved someone who had a heart attack and needed heart surgery. The doctors were reluctant to operate. They decided to do a Covid-19 test. They did a few tests. All negative. They operated him. Done another test after. Showed positive. Doctors were removed because of possible contamination. The heart clinic is under-operated now by decision. They dont accept new patients.
Some doctors voiced their anger that departments are shut down in general unable for patients to ask for treatment and their lives are at risk. There are also certainly cases of non-Covid patients with suspected symptoms mixed with Covid-19 patients thus contaminating them.
Antibody test isn't conclusive enough to know for sure. Make sure you use one of the better tests to increase chances of being accurate.
https://www.evaluate.com/vantage/ar...-19-antibody-tests-face-very-specific-problem
None of these are independently tested so you only have the maker's word for how accurate they are.
The State of Ohio had a few days of news reporting on the prison systems last week. They're fucked. Everyone is infected.
D
Deleted member 13524
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My point was - and is - always how much of "excess deaths" it creates compared to a common flu. In Europe the common flu causes up to 40% more deaths during the winter compared to the rest of the year, and we don't close down anything. It's what we should compare the coronavirus against.
No one is questioning wether the Covid-19 causes excess deaths or not. Nor should anyone question the same about the various forms of Influenza.
What 2 week lag? In most of Europe we've been in lockdown since mid March.
You also have no idea exactly when the virus started to spread in either country. You only know when they started making tests (which again have a generally narrow window to get a positive result from symptomatic patients, let alone the asymptomatic ones), and until March there were practically no tests available on a large scale. Northern Italy had been registering a spike in pneumonia-related deaths since January.
Considering those places only used virological tests, I don't think you can reallistically sample anything. A swab test can't tell with 100% accuracy if you already have the virus, nor if you had the virus and are now carrying antibodies for it.
The amount of false negatives on virological tests is overwhelming. The thing is only useful to decide which treatment plan a person with symptoms should follow, not for statistics IMO.
I mentioned starvation and malnourishment, but even if we go by starvation alone it kills 2000 people in the US per year. Or it was, back when the country's unemployment rate was below 5%. This rate is probably going to increase considering the sudden spike in unemployment and the fact that a large portion of the US population lives paycheck-by-paycheck.
Is the US a poorer region?
1 - How many people work on meat plants in the US?
2 - How many people who work on meat plants in the US die from the flu every year?
3 - How many people who work on meat plants in the US died from Covid-19 so far?
You only have a valid point if 3 is significantly larger 2 (and then you need to think how much larger does it justify the measures being taken).
Unless 2 is also a significant proportion of 1, after which you should think about how feasible it is to close all meat plants during Winter.
I wonder if the theory that predicts a crime wave only six months from now is putting the unforeseen social isolation conditions that the population is being subjected to.
I'd say it's not, because while losing many jobs in one place has been observed before, having this kind of population-wide social isolation in the mix has not.
Unless reporting on those would be considered irresponsible reporting because it could create panic and drive people to abort the lockdown.
For example, how often are the US news agencies comparing yearly flu-driven deaths to the Covid19-related ones?
2017 numbers point to around 45 000 deaths of the flu in the US.
The same is happening in Portugal's central Hospitals but in all departments. It's probably happening mostly everywhere else in Western countries. Most departments are just postponing all the procedures they can.
What are the symptoms like though? Is there the same degree of serious cases?