Posted on 06/15/2020 3:55:43 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
We’re not all gonna die??!!
I want my money back. They PROMISED.
For what time period? We're at at least month seven and there are 439,000 deaths worldwide. The average worldwide mortality from influenza is 650,000.
RE: IOWs it’s less deadly than the seasonal flu but possibly a bit more contagious.
Actually it is DEADLIER and MORE CONTAGIOUS than the seasonal flu, but not as deadly as we first thought it would be, and like the flu, it is deadliest to the elderly and those with already serious conditions.
The actual flu recently had a 10% confirmed death rate, making the standard flu far worse than COVID-19 has ever been (something like 244,000 actual flu positives against 24,000 confirmed flu deaths).
When you throw in the estimates the CDC does from what doctors report without testing, the death rate went down to 0.1% against those same real death cases.
Doctors and the CDC were never allowing “estimates” with COVID-19.
Actually H1N1 hit the younger folks harder as did the Spanish flu I believe. With H1N1 old folks like me who had the Hong Kong flu 40 years earlier had some immunity
(To paraphrase Groucho!)
China hyped the virus big time in their “leaked videos” early on. It was all propaganda to force the rest of the world to shutdown.
Now they are hyping a “second wave”.
Transparent.
Thanks!
Good grief. The assumption that the death rate is of the order of .5% has been around for at least 2 months. I figured it out from the death rate and reported infection rates by just looking at the published data.
I reported that here at FR as did many others.
The time period we’re talking about is the lifetime of the pandemic itself (until we reach herd immunity), assuming no changes to treatments or mutations in the virus itself (good or bad), and assuming no vaccine is found.
Just math really. You can run the numbers based on the R0, which tells you when you’ll reach herd immunity or you can run some different scenarios and plug in the IFR estimates from CDC (lower bound 0.26%) and JHC (0.5%-1%) to come up with the final tally. Given the original R0, you could expect herd immunity somewhere around 70%. But run it with some different scenarios of say 30%, 50%, and 70%, given that changes in the virus and changes in our behavior and in the environmental conditions will change the R0.
There’s 330,000,000 Americans. At 30% herd immunity, 99,000,000 will eventually become infected. CDC’s lower bound IFR of 0.26% gives you a lower bound of 257,400 deaths and JHC’s range gives you 495,000 - 990,000. At 50%, 165 million become infected, CDC’s lower bound is 429,000 and JHC’s range is 825,000 - 1.65 million deaths. At 70%, 231 million infections, CDC’s lower bound is 600,600 deaths and JHC’s range is 1.16 million - 2.31 million deaths.
Keep in mind, this is NOT what I’m saying is definitely about to happen. A lot of things can change these numbers. This is just the math you get when you plug in actual US population, historic herd immunity numbers based on the R0s of other infectious diseases, and the latest Infection Fatality Rate estimates provided by the CDC and Johns Hopkins.
Based on what we’ve seen so far, I think the 30% scenario is excessively optimistic. 50% is certainly possible if we can improve and maintain better sanitation and infection spread prevention methods. 70% comes back if we become lax in our approach to it. The problem is when winter arrives and conditions favor SARS-CoV-2 spread. I expect we’ll see things quiet down this summer, then come back later. Latest projections indicate we should see things quiet down slowly into early September, where we’ll see increases in cases (actual, not just who takes a test) and fatalities.
When you ask about time period, that’s more challenging and it depends on the variable R0, which includes changes to our own behavior. For example, if we shuttered the US border such that no one could come in or out, and everyone in the US (literally every man, woman, and child) stayed at home for around 3-5 weeks (and yes, this is absolutely impossible and not what I’m saying should happen), then the R0 would drop to nearly zero almost immediately and COVID-19 would be gone in that time period. If we get a vaccine, it all ends once that’s deployed to enough people (~70% or so). Otherwise, it depends on how long it takes to reach the herd immunity based on its R0. If our behavior goes back to what it was in January, that could be in less than a year. With current behavior changes (minus the protests/riots), that could be a couple of years. That’s where models become useful: you can model different scenarios and say “If we all do X, here’s what will happen, and if we all do Y, this other sequence of events will happen”.
The benefit of drawing it out with things like social distancing is two-fold. First, we want to ensure hospitals aren’t overwhelmed like they were in Italy. Where we are right now, that doesn’t seem to be a problem, so it seems like we’ve avoided that. Second, there are over 135 vaccine candidates in trials right now. If any one of them works, then we reach herd immunity without all the deaths that come with it.
That makes your numbers utterly meaningless. Especially since you didn't state whether you meant worldwide or just in the U.S.
It could be a year, it could be five years. It pretty much looks like it's over now though so we can just compare it to one year of seasonal flu. If worldwide deaths get to 650k.
You didn’t read my post after about the first line or two. If you’d like to read what I wrote and discuss it, that’s fine. I clearly covered which population we’re measuring and covered potential timelines based on variations in behavior. Also, they aren’t “my numbers”. They’re the Census Bureau’s, the CDC’s, and Johns Hopkins. I just took their numbers and plugged them in because I can do basic multiplication (or at least, my calculator can).
Worth noting we’re just over 3 months in to real activity with this (we hit 50 deaths on March 10th) and we’re already well over 3 years worth of seasonal flu deaths in the US (37,000 annual on average vs 118,000). And no, it isn’t over now. There’s about 740 deaths per day on average currently from it. We’ll be at 130,000 by July 4th, 150,000 by August 5th, and 200,000 by October 1st. An estimated 34,000 died in the US during the entire 2018-2019 flu season.
So .....President Trump was right
Now, that’s funny right there, I don’t care who you are...
Yes, I did. I read the whole post before responding.
For later reading
I know someone who was very sick in mid- to late-January after a big corporate meeting in Florida. Took him 2-3 weeks to recover. He recently took an antibody test. Came up positive.
I am highly skeptical of antibody tests. This is because, in my practical experience, I almost never have seen an antibody that recognizes a single antigen. This is because antibodies recognize antigens on the basis of physical characteristics that may be shared among many proteins.
I read a few days ago of how serology (antibody) studies were used to study a particular virus for decades, until techniques to study the molecular composition of the virus were developed. It turned out that what was believed to be one virus was actually three related viruses.
Similarly, Covid-19 is one of a group of coronaviruses. Some researchers have already noted cross-reactivity between Covid-19 (which they call SARS2) and SARS. [https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.15.993097v1] Covid-19 is already known to infect cells through the same pathway as other coronaviruses; this fact alone suggests that antibodies against other coronaviruses will also react against Covid-19, making serology testing useless as an indicator of past infection.
What this means in terms of the disease itself is still unclear. Can cross-reactive antibodies protect against Covid-19 disease? We have seen that Covid-19 illness in young children is not as serious as in older people. Young children who are notoriously prone to catching frequent colds may have already had recent infection with one or more of the circulating coronaviruses. On the other hand, antibodies sometimes enhance the virulence of a pathogen; this is seen in the case of FIP, a fatal coronavirus infection that affects cats.
The CDC warns that positive antibody tests in an area where Covid-19 activity is low are likely to be false positives. And many of the claims that Covid-19 is widespread (despite an absence of confirmed cases) are based on serology testing.
While serology testing has value in Covid-19 research, I would not use it as a means of determining past infection. The only accurate ways to determine infection is through virus characterization using RT-PCR or virus culture. I do not know how long virus particles remain in the body after the patient recovers from the infection, but it may be weeks: news media reports indicate that Covid-19 virus was found in Floyd George’s body at autopsy, and he was known to be infected in (IIRC) March. So it might be possible to recover virus particles after the fact to determine past infection.
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