> we have real data showing that there are long term effects from getting full blown COVID.
As in, 90% (probably more because asymptomatic people are never tested) of people actually have no symptoms at all and seem to go along fine with it? Or are you talking about something else?
> because that's the amount of people who don't show symptoms anyway.
I don't think this is accurate. A large majority of people show no or relatively mild symptoms comparable to a seasonal flu or cold, yes, but that's not the same thing as no symptoms at all for a large majority.
> For example, people in the contemporary control group weren’t tested for COVID-19, so it’s possible that some of them actually had mild infections.
How doesn't this completely invalidate the title? If we aren't actually comparing between a group that provably did not have COVID and one that did, we can't possibly draw any conclusions about the effect of having COVID compared to not having it at all.
> far less than 100% of the population in your country will ever be infected
Do we have solid information to assert that? SARS and the flu spread from people who are exhibiting symptoms. This new virus is different in that regard, which seems like an open invitation to approach 100% infection rates.
I don’t know either way, but it certainly doesn’t seem unlikely that a solid majority could be infected.
> Corona virus has infected fewer than 100,000 people and killed less than 1000.
Of the 42,638 who have caught coronavirus, 1,016 have died, and 3,996 people have recovered.
Because it's not simply ongoing but accelerating, we can't say the fatality rate is simply 1k/42k = 2.4%. The overwhelming majority of the people who have caught the disease still have the disease, and we can't say for sure that it is not going to kill them. We can say for sure that the mortality rate is significantly higher than 2.4%.
> this article says the incident rate for covid-19 is 25%, which is shockingly high.
To be fair, we're not fully aware of all the cases of COVID. Most likely, many people had COVID but didn't know. Because we didn't have proper testing for a long time, our sampling of 'those who had COVID' is almost certainly wrong
> Say for example half of the population, 50 out of 100.
I think you're confusing susceptible and immune. If the antibody numbers are legit, then the asymptomatic rate is around 90%, but that's not the full story. You have to remember that asymptomatic people still spread the virus, so this plays differently in herd immunity modeling. You're still looking at a 1% average death rate in NYC too given those numbers.
That 50% of people you mentioned is not about symptomatic - they must also not be able to transmit. Otherwise using a SIR model or similar there's still 80% of the population that can catch and infect others. I have seen nothing about such natural immunity in people even in small numbers, let alone at 50% of the population. That assumption is doing a lot of legwork in your herd immunity claim.
At best, your assumptions still means we need to accept just under a million deaths. At worst, even with no increased death rate due to hospital load, that's closer to 3 million. When other countries have shown clear alternatives by taking measures that don't lead to 1% of their population dying (such as Germany at 0.01% so far), one of which is mask usage, I don't see how there's harm in the policy when it could mean literally saving millions of lives.
All of that relies on antibodies lasting, which doesn't seem to be guaranteed[1], as I pointed out in my post before. That can make this much worse if/when people begin to catch it again.
> of evidence that might mean COVID-19 is even worse than we thought.
As a scientist I say sometimes that one of the unnoticed victims of SARS-CoV-2 is media reporting. Some newspapers here (Italy) really love gruesome details, to be honest, but they conveniently forget talking about the frequency of said details.
I mean, if you have a respiratory disease that can blow your head off (this is just an absurd example), you prepare differently depending if it happens in 50% of the cases or in 0.5%. This is completely lost in news reporting.
In addition, the news (but sadly, some experts too!) treat SARS-CoV-2 as a magic virus that does everything different from any other known biological entity. While I was initially surprised to hear those cases of meningitis, I then found in the literature that other coronaviruses can infect the central nervous system (e.g. [1]).
It doesn't mean this complication less severe, when it occurs. But it's not a feature of this virus alone.
Yeah, okay. I know anecdotes are not data, we're supposed to trust the Internet over our own eyes and all of that, but come on, do you think I'm dense?
I know over a hundred people who've had coronavirus at this point, this is clearly total nonsense.
No, there are tests that have high false-positive rates. The studies in both the US and Europe used similarly flawed tests and didn't correctly account for the false-positive rates of those tests. [0]
There are two ways to think through how these results are flawed: the first is that the false positive rates of the tests is vastly higher than the prior (which we'll assume is approximately the confirmed case rate per capita) is. There were three studies, NYC, Santa Clara, and one in Europe that I know of. All three tests had false positive rates over 2%, and one test had a false positive rate of like 10%. So when a study shows that a large percent of the population have the virus, and that percentage is suspiciously similar to the false-positive rate of the test, you pause.
The second is a much more grokkable one. Let's assume that 2% of people in Santa Clara were infected (per the study), then 40,000 people are infected, and of them around 2000 people were symptomatic enough to get tested and be hospitalized/tested (per available stats). Or 5% of infections are symptomatic enough to get noticed, ish. Then we'd see that NYC would have ~3.5 million people infected now, or something like 40%.
So we'd expect to see 40% (or more actually) of people tested in NY and NYC test positive for covid. But we don't[1]. We see that as NY adds more tests, the positive rate of the more reliable tests is going down, because they can test more people and because NY appears to be over the hump. At peak, 20% of people were testing positive daily, now it's down to closer to 10%.
And note that most of the tests are going to people who have some symptoms of something, which is why it's that high. 40% of NY residents were infected, we'd expect to see more than 40% of the tests positive, but we don't.
If you do the same calculation but with death rate, you find that there are more people in NYC with Covid than live in NYC. In conclusion: those studies are bad because the tests they use are unreliable.
>more than 11 million, there have been 13,164 cases throughout the entire pandemic, and 264 deaths
Given covid has proved really infectious but often mild, those numbers just say they have terrible testing. Probably more like 50%+ of the population have had it but not been diagnosed. In the UK they figure 70%+ and we have imperfect testing too.
Deaths are typically calculated as dying within 30 days of a positive test so no testing => no official covid deaths.
> There's reason to think Korea found most if not all infection.
This is beyond ridiculous and you have no basis for making that assertion. As of last Saturday, In South Korea, as of the weekend only 248,000 people out of a population of 50,000,000, with 8,086 +ve cases and 72 deaths.
There is significant evidence that not only are most cases mild, but often asymptomatic.
> According to Crisanti, the director of the virology lab of U Padua, as little as 10% of #COVID2019 carriers show any symptoms at all. He sampled repeatedly the entire 3k+ population of Vo ', one of the initial clusters.
> 700 have been tested. Kári says that about half of those who tested positive have shown no symptoms, and the other half show symptoms have having a regular cold.
> "The vast majority of people infected with Covid-19, between 50 and 75%, are completely asymptomatic but represent a formidable source of contagion". The Professor of Clinical Immunology of the University of Florence Sergio Romagnani writes
> But is now with us at scale and all the evidence points to a rough 20%, 1-in-5 hospitalization rate [3].
No. It doesn't. That link doesn't say why they were hospitalised. In America if your insurance is good enough you can be referred for little to no reason.
> Around 15% of the people who get COVID-19 need ICU
I'm usually the doomssayer, but that's 15% of people who are diagnosed. Usually people who are asymptomatic or nearly asymptomatic don't get diagnosed.
Only a few countries have testing programs widespread enough to start estimating case vs infection rates... and certainly not the US, where there are plenty of people who have been obviously infected who are still not included in the official counts because of god-knows-what-the-CDC-is-doing.
What is clear enough is that whatever the rate of serious cases are, it's more than high enough to overload the hospitals-- just as is happening now in Italy. So I fully agree with your point, I just don't want to see if lost in the noise because some people will notice the 15% claim is almost certainly an overestimate.
>Anybody who's even remotely healthy has nothing to worry about with this pandemic.
Absolutely untrue: [1]Otherwise healthy people have died from COVID-19. And [2], healthy, asymptomatic carriers have infected friends and family members who have themselves died from it.
The parent comment is misleading, dangerous, and should be removed.
Not true. It has been estimated that asymptomatic COVID-19 represents at most around 35% of the cases.
* https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
* https://www.sciencealert.com/over-a-third-of-covid-infection...
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