Corona Virus - How is that working for you?

Current ER doctors, back to work through the "crisis."

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Interesting. The Washington, DC metro area (six million people) is almost entirely government workers and contractors, thus "essential" workers. So, they didn't shut down employment for most people and yet are not a "hot spot" while areas with similar demographics that are completely shut down are "hot spots."

The lesson I take from this is that crushing people's livelihoods is not a very good solution.

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Prepping is a a range. Some need 3 years worth of food and a few claymores to protect it. For others it's a full bathtub when a storm is approaching and the power to the well pump might go out.

Look at this and tell me where they are wrong with their numbers or process.

What they did was simple: they looked at the fraction of patients who tested positive for #COVID19 at the clinics they own. They found 340 out of 5213 tests were postive, about 6.6%. Then they assume the same fraction of the whole population are infected.

From there, they scale up to the state level and claim 12% incidence statewide. The news story says it is using the same calculation, but it can't be—how did they get from 6.6% to 12%? Perhaps they estimating infected *ever* versus infected *currently*. It's not clear.

Using that 12% infected figure, and a known 1400 deaths in California, they assume 1400 out of 4.7 million have died. That gives them an infection fatality rate of 0.03%. That is, they think that if 10,000 are infected, 3 will die on average.

The problem with this approach is that during a pandemic, the people who come into an urgent care clinic are not a random sample of the population. A large fraction of them are coming in precisely because they suspect that they have the disease. This generates sampling bias.

Estimating that fraction infected from patients at an urgent care facility is a bit like estimating the average height of Americans from the players on an NBA court. It's not a random sample, and it gives a highly biased estimate. Moreover the estimate does not pass even a basic plausibility check. In New York City, 12,067 people are known to have died from the virus, out of a population of 8.4 million. This is a rate of 0.14% of all people. Not just infected people. All people. That gives us a lower bound on the death rate in New York. Not an estimate, a lower bound. The death rate for infected people is obviously higher than 0.14%, because not everyone in New York has been infected. And yet that 0.14% lower bound is nearly *five times as high* as the 0.03% that the Bakerfield duo are claiming. They've used absurd methodology to arrive at an implausible number.

And this
Jennifer L Kasten, MD, MSc, MSc

 

I keep posting the antibody studies, but nobody seems to grasp the implications of that.

30% of a random street sample in Boston came back positive for the antibodies (60 people out of 200). 21% in NYC came up positive. 14% in upstate NY came back positive. In a low density area of Northern California, 2.5 to 4.5% had previously had the virus.

These ER doctors aren't alone. Their study is reinforced by other studies in other areas of the US. The virus is everywhere. Everywhere. And most people don't get sick enough to seek out medical care. This virus has a death rate far, far below 1%.

I point out again, that in the densely populated Wash. DC area where most people are "essential workers" (government employees) they kept working and yet ... DC is not a hot spot! The shutdown was an overreaction. Period.

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I'll admit I have been mostly reading the posts in my other forum by guys actually working on testing and nurses in ER's so I didn't read your links.

What I hear you saying is that, after your analysis of the evidence available to you, that you feel you are wiser than all of the top immunologists and virologists in the world?

Anyhoo. Looks to me like if the people who made a career of studying this stuff are right, we're fkd. Economies won't run if 30% of the consumers are too nervous to go to IHOP, fly or go to a ball game.

 

What? If 30% of the consumers have already had the virus, didn't notice or barely noticed, and now have the antibodies (are virus proof) why would they be nervous?

The deaths are in a tiny minority of patients with predispositions that have been identified (age, secondary illness, etc). THOSE people need to be protected, while the rest of the world resumes their lives since they have little risk.

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My bad. What I'm looking at the consumer economy and opining. From what I see, because of the lack of consistent messaging and lack of federal leadership in the US that for the next 18 mos 30% of the people who flew for a vacation will not feel safe flying and the same number won't go to the mall. (pulled from my gut so no link). 30% of the consumers will avoid going out to eat. 30% of sole proprietorships will fold.Economy is in a depression.

 

Maybe.. Maybe not.
What the first coronavirus antibody testing surveys can tell us
Only time will tell. It is too soon to make snap judgements about a virus we know very little about.

 

I agree with you there, though lack of consistent messaging is going on from top to bottom and is worst within some states. New York is counting 3500 nursing home deaths, deaths caused by the state forcing nursing homes to take people with Covid19 into a place where the elderly are exposed. How inconsistent is that? The elderly are most vulnerable, so are forced to be exposed to recovering Covid patients by the state..? And like you (until just recently), most people don't even grasp that 'flattening the curve' only spreads out the infection. That is due to poor messaging, just as you say.

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A crisis exposes flaws in any system or design. In my grand parents generation, the elderly lived at home with their extended family, but Americans no longer do this much at all now. We warehouse them in 'assisted living, nursing and group homes' because we can't have our busy lives interrupted by such responsibility's. Such things are breeding grounds for our seniors to catch things, much as cruise ships have proven to be.

What was NY or any state to do? Demand their family's take them back? As a nation we pay money to make unpleasant problems go away. Maybe we should take a good look at ourselves in the mirror.

 

FORCED? Sorry, I can't believe that the state wold FORCE the elderly sick into a nursing home. Not yet.

 

My sis told me that if you want to skip all of the paperwork and waiting, drop off your old person at a state welfare office on Christmas Eve. She saw that done a couple of times.

 

How Australians feel about the coronavirus
Some interesting numbers...

How Australians feel about the coronavirus crisis and Scott Morrison's response - ABC News

 

To me, the obvious thing to have done, was set up COVID-19 only facilities. Places that would only take those who were infected or were recovering, rather than intermingle them with a healthy nursing home population.

The patients were "medically stable."
https://coronavirus.health.ny.gov/s...covid19-_nhadmissionsreadmissions_-032520.pdf
However, not a word about them still being ill or contagious. New York put all the onus of protection on the nursing homes, relying on the NHs to see that they were quarantined/isolated and the NH staff was provided with protection.

That was how drastic New York's problem had become...On March 8, COVID-19 patients could not be released until the had 2 negative COVID tests & a 7-day wait. By the end of March, they were pushing them out of the hospitals so long as they were "medically stable."

 

Vegetarian...im not surprised he wants out...You do know that guy had an English accent? That dude aint Australian...He's a Pom.
Theres a saying in Australia..."Bloody whinging Pom!" They come to Australia and complain it's nothing like England...

 

Quote by the governor of Florida. New state motto?


Apologies for doubting. I've felt home quarantine was counter productive. I suppose ideally we would have a federal organization with the ability to house, feed and tend to 5000 of the contagious.

 

The word quarantine comes from quarantena, meaning "forty days", used in the 14th–15th-centuries Venetian language and designating the period that all ships were required to be isolated before passengers and crew could go ashore during the Black Death plague epidemic; it followed the trentino, or thirty-day isolation period, first imposed in 1377 in the Republic of Ragusa, Dalmatia (modern Dubrovnik in Croatia).

Merriam-Webster gives various meanings to the noun form, including "a period of 40 days", several relating to ships, "a state of enforced isolation", and as "a restriction on the movement of people and goods which is intended to prevent the spread of disease or pests".

 

The feds (army corps of engineers) built facilities just for that, and New York didn't use them, choosing the nursing homes instead. 3500 people have died in New York state nursing homes, though nobody has tallied how many of those infections were introduced by Cuomo's order.

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