Rate of infection 50 times higher?

Climber

Climber

Well-known member
As Dr SLO pointed out, a preprint (i.e NOT PEER REVIEWED) of a report with just a few days of work put into it has been grabbed by the press and heralded as FACT by some publications.

It's very, very premature to be drawing ANY of the conclusions being drawn by a shit-ton of people.

This premature release and misrepresentation of what it means could ultimately kill thousands if not tens of thousands of people.

It would be great if it's correct, but my gut tells me that the conclusions being drawn are way off the mark and dangerously so.
 
bojangle

bojangle

FN # 40
Staff member
https://www.bayarearidersforum.com/forums/showpost.php?p=10561993&postcount=88

Dr_SLO said:
The preprint that was cited has a lot of issues. My biggest issue is the complete lack of data presented. Yes, there are numbers but actual data relating to the tests, how many were IgG, IgM, and IgG and IgM positive are missing, plus, the most important part, how many had previously shown symptoms. The information from this was collected but not reported in the manuscript. There were also two false positives (0.5%) in the negative control samples. Another important factor is where were the positives identified. Were they geographically clustered or evenly distributed. If they're clustered it will invalidate the projection to an entire population. This is the sort of science I hate; first past the post. It's very typical of Stanford.

This preprint also demonstrates the importance of peer review of which I do a considerable amount. If this came across my desk for review I would haul it over the coals. The conclusions a very week and over interpreted from the small sample size (3,330), poor data analysis and oversimplified population modelling. Sadly, the scientific rigor of a lot of studies during this pandemic has been allowed to slide because some folk are desperate to get their work published first.

To a final point, if this paper does hold and there are 80k cases then this further reinforces why SIP orders are needed not the opposite.
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budman

budman

General Menace
Staff member
The media grabs this stuff and shares..

The General population reads and thinks differently because it has been reported. I know I do to some degree, but fall back to what I do know as a basis on dealing with the SIP order.

Bottom line is I don't know enough and it still makes sense to me.
Most of what I do know I had learned here thanks to a few folks in the know and their resources for solid information. Thank you for that guys.
 
Dr_SLO

Dr_SLO

Well-known member
A note on infection fatality for NYC

Today NYC stands at 15,239 individuals who have been lost to COVID. The population of NYC is ~8.5M. With an infection fatality rate of 0.12-0.2% proposed in the Stanford study that would put 7.6M-12.7M of people infected with SARS-CoV-2 :nchantr
 
Dr_SLO

Dr_SLO

Well-known member
Caddywumpus said:
https://www.mercurynews.com/?utm_source=Blueconic&utm_medium=corona&utm_campaign=close

Considering our first death was here in February I'm not surprised that a city with people stacked on top of eachother and super reliant on public transportation is getting shredded compared to our relative low density
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Interesting to note that the virus was here in early February. About the same time as Washington.

The purpose of my post was not clear. It was a calculation to demonstrate that the Stanford serology study can't be used for extrapolation. Based on the infection fatality rate that the study estimates all people in NYC are now already infected. Highly unlikely.
 
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Caddywumpus

Caddywumpus

4N631
If the doubling rate is 1 person infects one other person per day after 30 days roughly 1 billion people would be infected
 
DataDan

DataDan

Mama says he's bona fide
Dr_SLO said:
Today [4/21/2020] NYC stands at 15,239 individuals who have been lost to COVID. The population of NYC is ~8.5M. With an infection fatality rate of 0.12-0.2% proposed in the Stanford study that would put 7.6M-12.7M of people infected with SARS-CoV-2 :nchantr
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That may be the New York state total, not New York City. This page at the NY Times (updated 4/22/2020) reports 10,301 deaths for the City, 14,828 for the State. If the infection fatality rate were 0.12%, that would mean 8.6 million infections in a city with 8.5 million population.

One problem with the New York fatality total is that they are counting victims WITH the virus, not victims OF the virus. Because of that, based on Times data, NYC fatality rate from known cases is 7.4% while the California rate is 3.8%.

For info, another antibody survey was done by USC in Los Angeles County resulting in a fatality rate estimate of 0.14% to 0.27%, similar to the Stanford/Santa Clara County estimate:
Based on results of the first round of testing, the research team estimates that approximately 4.1% of the county's adult population has antibody to the virus. Adjusting this estimate for statistical margin of error implies about 2.8% to 5.6% of the county's adult population has antibody to the virus- which translates to approximately 221,000 to 442,000 adults in the county who have had the infection [10 million population]. That estimate is 28 to 55 times higher than the 7,994 confirmed cases of COVID-19 reported to the county by the time of the study in early April. The number of COVID-related deaths in the county has now surpassed 600.​

Your point is still a good one: If the fatality rate is that low, infection in New York City must be far more widespread than plausible. However, deaths per million population in NYC (1,200) is so dramatically higher than anywhere else in the US (LA County 60, SF 22), that something weird seems to be going on there.
 
Dr_SLO

Dr_SLO

Well-known member
DataDan said:
That may be the New York state total, not New York City. This page at the NY Times (updated 4/22/2020) reports 10,301 deaths for the City, 14,828 for the State. If the infection fatality rate were 0.12%, that would mean 8.6 million infections in a city with 8.5 million population.

One problem with the New York fatality total is that they are counting victims WITH the virus, not victims OF the virus. Because of that, based on Times data, NYC fatality rate from known cases is 7.4% while the California rate is 3.8%.

For info, another antibody survey was done by USC in Los Angeles County resulting in a fatality rate estimate of 0.14% to 0.27%, similar to the Stanford/Santa Clara County estimate:
Based on results of the first round of testing, the research team estimates that approximately 4.1% of the county's adult population has antibody to the virus. Adjusting this estimate for statistical margin of error implies about 2.8% to 5.6% of the county's adult population has antibody to the virus- which translates to approximately 221,000 to 442,000 adults in the county who have had the infection [10 million population]. That estimate is 28 to 55 times higher than the 7,994 confirmed cases of COVID-19 reported to the county by the time of the study in early April. The number of COVID-related deaths in the county has now surpassed 600.​

Your point is still a good one: If the fatality rate is that low, infection in New York City must be far more widespread than plausible. However, deaths per million population in NYC (1,200) is so dramatically higher than anywhere else in the US (LA County 60, SF 22), that something weird seems to be going on there.
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It was the NYC total as of about 07:00 this morning taken from https://coronavirus.1point3acres.com/en, which breaks things down by county. As with all media outlets, the New York Times is always behind on the actual numbers.

The USC study also involved the same investigators from Stanford and likely performed a similar analysis. Not had time to read the preprint. Both studies are getting a lot of flack from the wider scientific community Feud over Stanford coronavirus study: ‘The authors owe us all an apology’. I also know one of the volunteers that collected samples, an immunologist, and they said is was the worst management of this type of study they had seen. This is more a reflection on the peer review process than the data itself. Releasing medically relevant data prematurely has vey negative consequences on the management of infectious diseases at the population level.
 
Dr_SLO

Dr_SLO

Well-known member
Caddywumpus said:
If the doubling rate is 1 person infects one other person per day after 30 days roughly 1 billion people would be infected
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That's not how transmission works. The R value for SARS-CoV-2 is 2.3, meaning that 2.3 people will be infected from one case. If it takes an individual
14 days to recover from infection that's 2.3 people in 14 days. This virus is slow to spread until it gets into high density. One or two cases here and there are going to take about 4-6 weeks before it's on the public health radar, which fits with what was seen here in the Bay Area.
 
Climber

Climber

Well-known member
GAJ said:
And yet we didn't have a massive NYC style outbreak.

Odd.
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When you have the kind of exposure growth of a virus like this, just a few days makes a huge difference.

Also, they use mass transit far, far more than they do in the Bay Area.
 
DataDan

DataDan

Mama says he's bona fide
An anitibody survey similar to the ones in Santa Clara and Los Angeles Counties was conducted in New York, and the results are reported today in the New York Times:

One of every five New York City residents tested positive for antibodies to the coronavirus, according to preliminary test results described by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo on Thursday, suggesting the virus had spread far more widely than known.

The results also provided the tantalizing prospect that many New Yorkers who never knew they had been infected — possibly as many as 2.7 million, the governor said — had already encountered the virus, and survived. Mr. Cuomo also suggested the death rate was far lower than believed.
...
In New York City, about 21 percent, or one of every five residents, tested positive for coronavirus antibodies during the state survey. The rate was 16.7 percent in Long Island, 11.7 percent in Westchester and Rockland Counties, and 3.6 percent in the rest of the state.

Almost 14 percent of those tested in New York [state] were positive, according to preliminary results from the state survey, which sampled approximately 3,000 people over two days at grocery and big-box stores.​
The 21% positive result is much higher than reported for Santa Clara or LA Counties. Estimated lethality of the virus based on 11,372 New York City deaths reported as of 4/22/2020 by the New York State Department of Health would be 0.4%, also much higher than the California estimates.

The Times story does not mention corrections for demographics of the sample vs. demographics of the city, so this is apparently subject to big changes. Still, another indication that the disease seems to be less deadly than originally thought is a positive development.
 
Dr_SLO

Dr_SLO

Well-known member
DataDan said:
An anitibody survey similar to the ones in Santa Clara and Los Angeles Counties was conducted in New York, and the results are reported today in the New York Times:

Still, another indication that the disease seems to be less deadly than originally thought is a positive development.
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There's not a link to the study in the article. If it's anything along the lines of the Stanford study it will be skewed. Regardless, with the 11,372 New York City deaths cited that still puts a fatality rate at 0.6%. It's hard to know the exact number of deaths because there have been several thousand untested but had COVID symptoms that died increasing the reported COVID associated deaths to 16,388 today. If the serology holds at 21% that's a current case fatality rate of 0.9%, about on par with the reported 1-2% fatality in a population and not less deadly than previously thought.
 
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