Covid-19 Outbreak of new SARS-like coronavirus (Covid-19)

[novaveritas]

This demonstrates an unfortunate facet of mainstream reporting on science. "Mixed, low-quality evidence on efficacy" becomes a definitive "hydroxychloroquine not effective" and instead of "one research group develops model that estimates only 6% of actual infections detected worldwide" the estimate is just stated as fact. You can usually suss out the actual situation in the body of the article (although it often seems to be admitted reluctantly) but headlines ought to be held to the same standards of factuality.

The Gurinard sort of forgot to mention the original source of that story on HCQ worked for Gilead and may just possibly have an ongoing conflict of interest. The newspapers seem to have fallen into their old habit of just repeating stuff thay find online verbatim without sanity or fact checking.

 

[novaveritas]

The average seasonal flu death in America is what... 60,000ish?

So if 70% of Americans get covid 19, and 0.37% of them die. That's... about 850,000.

That still seems kinda bad.

Do you seriously think iterative systems can be described accurately or usefully using the multiply early small number with a very big number to get a final number technique ??

How about you and Atara get together and come up with some novel ideas he's a modeller and a believer and you are..well, what are you?

 

[JessFR]

If there are so many more people with unreported cases it just goes to show how mild the virus is for the vast majority of people who get it. Bit of perspective.

It also has to be kept in perspective that it doesn't have to be very lethal to still kill enough people at the same time to cause a lot of problems.

Taking a 0.37% mortality rate and a 70% infection rate, over let's say the next 2 years, in the US.

That's about 800,000 dead.

And something like, 1 in 8 people who died in that timeframe having been killed by the virus.

It doesn't take a high death rate to add up to a lot.

 

[JessFR]

Do you seriously think iterative systems can be described accurately or usefully using the multiply early small number with a very big number to get a final number technique ??

How about you and Atara get together and come up with some novel ideas he's a modeller and a believer and you are..well, what are you?

What are you? I'm not the one that keeps falling back on my supposed qualifications.

 

[JGrimez]

JG how would you handle covid-19? Herd immunity? Age bracket segregation? An advised but not mandated lockdown for a short but not long while

First they would need solid evidence that this is a serious pandemic threat. So far that's unknown. The death numbers are simply not there. If this was a legit pandemic then I would yes segregate the most vulnerable either by age or health and enact certain restrictions with regards to personal hygiene. What we're seeing now is too extreme and is about to cause much bigger problems

it's almost all just propaganda spam.

Wrong. It's closer to the truth, it's investigations and you're spreading lies because you are an authoritarian follower.

Look what's happening now behind the scenes that the media are not reporting on. If they were as obsessed with showing the public the state of our global food infrastructure - then people would be rioting on the streets demanding that they lift the lockdowns and let us get back to work:

 

[Wilson Wilson]

It so has to be kept in perspective that it doesn't have to be very lethal to still kill enough people at the same time to cause a lot of problems.

Taking a 0.37% mortality rate and a 70% infection rate, over let's say the next 2 years.

That's about 800,000 dead.

And something like, 1 in 8 people who died in that timeframe having been killed by the virus.

It doesn't take a high death rate to add up to a lot.

Right but when there's media reports talking about mortality rates of up to 4%, the fact that analysis brings that estimate down to 0.37% is pretty good.

And again, if this thing is indeed so much more widespread than the data shows (which is likely given the difficulty in testing) and most people recover after self-isolating at home for a bit, it shows this is actually pretty mild for most who get it.

Since there is a 70% infection rate and I was ill for two weeks just recently I probably got it. Will find out for sure when those antigen tests are out. But if it was the virus it was the same as having a cold, it just lasted a bit longer. Codeine and paracetamol helped greatly.

 

[JessFR]

Wrong. It's closer to the truth, it's investigations and you're spreading lies because you are an authoritarian follower.

Bluelight is not your personal investigation wiki.

I don't care if everything you've posted is true, I care that it's to such a quantity that it's impeding using the forum as.. A forum.

 

[JessFR]

Right but when there's media reports talking about mortality rates of up to 4%, the fact that analysis brings that estimate down to 0.37% is pretty good.

And again, if this thing is indeed so much more widespread than the data shows (which is likely given the difficulty in testing) and most people recover after self-isolating at home for a bit, it shows this is actually pretty mild for most who get it.

Since there is a 70% infection rate and I was ill for two weeks just recently I probably got it. Will find out for sure when those antigen tests are out. But if it was the virus it was the same as having a cold, it just lasted a bit longer. Codeine and paracetamol helped greatly.

For you perhaps. Others here on bluelight have gotten pretty sick.

Don't get me wrong I'd much prefer it be milder for more people. That's good news. We can argue about the responsibility of the media's reporting, but personally I wasn't really arguing one way or another about the media.

Just that for society as a whole, 0.37% mortality rate is still quite high.

Should the media have done more to emphasize that the observed death rate would certainly go down over time? Yeah probably. But that's a question of media ethics which wasn't really what I was getting at.

 

[JGrimez]

How many posts a day am I allowed to make? I'll juggle that with how many hours I'm allowed outside of my house daily. You'd make a great authoritarian enforcer, too bad you're way down the ladder like the rest of us.

 

[novaveritas]

This may be the most ironic thing ever posted in CEPS

A number of such studies have come out. IIRC one in Italy showed a 38% antibody rate; one in rural Colorado showed a 2% antibody rate.

One reason not to be too optimistic about these analyses are the data showing that there are multiple strains of SARS-CoV-2 and that we're not sure if patients who have recovered develop a good immunity. Exposure to one strain might not indicate immunity to all of them.

Another issue is that there are a lot of other coronaviruses which carry peptides similar to peptides in SARS-CoV-2. Antibodies target a specific substructure or protein, not the whole virus, so an antibody the body develops in response to one virus might happen to bind to another.

the rural colorado is the telluride study right? you might want to look closely at that study first.

Atara you don't mind me quoting your post this when you start shilling for vaccination with a single antigen, as you undoubtedly will do when that is what your owners want you uber-rationalists to do.


Cross reacting antibodies from the original SARS hit nCoV spike with reasonable affinity, you don't need high affinity antibodies initially clonal selection and then clonal expansion and the huge search that involves sorts that out.

Corona is fairly clever with translation error checking so with a relatively low drift rate, leading to bunch of surface epitopes being highly stable.

Personally I suspect that the key to effective immunity with this one is not just circlualting IgG levels and that anybody who is saying antibody levels are the only correlate with immunity is missing something very very important. It is convenient if antibody levels do correlate with immunity because that makes vaccine surrogate end points easier and makes vaccine development easier but it is a bare faced lie. People who have asymptomatic or mild infections with limited inflammation will have low circulating antibody levels but are functionally immune at the end of it. nCoV not the first CoV to jump into humans the rest of them are now pretty benign, they probably were not so benign at the start limited evidence is one jumped around 120 years ago and had much higher mortalitity and morbidity early on and now is a cold. So the future actually is much brighter than people think.

 

[novaveritas]

What are you? I'm not the one that keeps falling back on my supposed qualifications.

where have I ever said what my qualifications are?
you do appeal to authority in a very tiresome way, where are your own original ideas Jess? Share them.
You cannot parrot the consensus and wave your hands around waaaah conspiracy theory whenever you run into difficulties.
you perhaps should hook up with Atara and have lots of dull consensus babies.

 

[JessFR]

where have I ever said what my qualifications are?

Never, that's my point.

 

[novaveritas]

Bluelight is not your personal investigation wiki.

I don't care if everything you've posted is true, I care that it's to such a quantity that it's impeding using the forum as.. A forum.

It is not your personal sandpit either

 

[novaveritas]

Never, that's my point.

come on Jess step up you are smarter than that. In one post you accuse me of using supposed qualifications and the next when it is pointed out I don't use appeal to authority you swerve and directly contradict yourself.

I am becoming more and more disappointed with you Jess, I know you can do better, step up to the plate.

 

[JessFR]

How many posts a day am I allowed to make? I'll juggle that with how many hours I'm allowed outside of my house daily. You'd make a great authoritarian enforcer, too bad you're way down the ladder like the rest of us.

I just don't want the majority of every page of every thread in CEPS to look like your personal news feed.

 

[Wilson Wilson]

For you perhaps. Others here on bluelight have gotten pretty sick.

Don't get me wrong I'd much prefer it be milder for more people. That's good news. We can argue about the responsibility of the media's reporting, but personally I wasn't really arguing one way or another about the media.

Just that for society as a whole, 0.37% mortality rate is still quite high.

Should the media have done more to emphasize that the observed death rate would certainly go down over time? Yeah probably. But that's a question of media ethics which wasn't really what I was getting at.

I'm not trying to downplay that it can and does kill people. The perspective is in looking at things proportionately. Especially amongst all the panic.

The majority of people getting seriously ill or dying have underlying health conditions or are in advanced age. No this isn't the case for every single tragedy, but it's the case for the majority. Data shows this very clearly.

I saw a doctor on the news yesterday saying that most people dying from this would have died within the next few years anyway. This is still a big problem for health services since it's happening all at once, and still a tragedy for those families affected, but again it helps put things into perspective - those who aren't elderly or having the connected underlying health conditions likely do not have much to worry about.

If getting badly sick the worst outcome for the majority of the population, while many more simply experience mild cold symptoms, it's not exactly the end of the world, ya know?

Also there is bound to be selection bias in what people write about. As in I was not going on social media and talking about how I have the coronavirus etc because why would I when it was so mild? If I had those same symptoms last year during cold season I would have gotten up and gone to work during it, that's how mild it was. Would have had a few Nurofen Plus beforehand but that's it.

Only people with severe cases will make threads and social media posts about it, and those people are the ones who subsequently get articles written about them by the press, and the attention is drawn to the most severe cases.

Whereas you have this estimated tens of millions of people who got it and recovered at home after feeling a bit sick for a week or two.

Not as much of an attention grabber, so it goes unnoticed.

Hence, brining attention to this fact provides some much needed perspective.

 

[novaveritas]

I just don't want the majority of every page of every thread in CEPS to look like your personal news feed.

the irony of you now clogging up the thread with bitching about clogging up the thread is hilarious.

 

[JGrimez]

Thought experiment. Imagine you were told that if you keep using your car, within the next couple of years you would have a high probability (lets be super generous and say 70% ) of being involved in a 'traffic incident'. However, if you were, there would be an 80% chance that such an incident would be so insignificant that you would not even notice. For example, your tire might hit the curb lightly, or the car behind you might bump into yours softly and without damage.

Suppose that if you did have such an incident and it was noticeable (20% of incidents), there would be a 2% chance that you or anyone involved (like family members riding with you) would die. That is, even if you crashed and there would be damage to the car needing repair, 98% of the times all people involved would survive. According to my calculations, that means that overall, if you kept using your car, there would be a 0.0028% probability that someone would die within the next couple of years - either you, a family member, or a stranger involved in the incident. That means, 99.9972% chance that no one will die.

Of course, considering the overall population, that means that we can expect that 0.0028% would indeed die in a traffic incident within the next couple of years, whether you are personally involved in any or not. Suppose that you live in a city of a million people, then that means that 28 people will die in a traffic incident within the next couple of years.

Now here's the question. Knowing these figures, would you quit using your car or would you simply drive more carefully? Should the government ban cars altogether or should it improve laws and regulations to make car driving safer?

Because most of you are quite happy 'quitting your cars', and most governments are quite happy 'banning cars' nowadays."

 

[Wilson Wilson]

Thought experiment. Imagine you were told that if you keep using your car, within the next couple of years you would have a high probability (lets be super generous and say 70% ) of being involved in a 'traffic incident'. However, if you were, there would be an 80% chance that such an incident would be so insignificant that you would not even notice. For example, your tire might hit the curb lightly, or the car behind you might bump into yours softly and without damage.

Suppose that if you did have such an incident and it was noticeable (20% of incidents), there would be a 2% chance that you or anyone involved (like family members riding with you) would die. That is, even if you crashed and there would be damage to the car needing repair, 98% of the times all people involved would survive. According to my calculations, that means that overall, if you kept using your car, there would be a 0.0028% probability that someone would die within the next couple of years - either you, a family member, or a stranger involved in the incident. That means, 99.9972% chance that no one will die.

Of course, considering the overall population, that means that we can expect that 0.0028% would indeed die in a traffic incident within the next couple of years, whether you are personally involved in any or not. Suppose that you live in a city of a million people, then that means that 28 people will die in a traffic incident within the next couple of years.

Now here's the question. Knowing these figures, would you quit using your car or would you simply drive more carefully? Should the government ban cars altogether or should it improve laws and regulations to make car driving safer?

Because most of you are quite happy 'quitting your cars', and most governments are quite happy 'banning cars' nowadays."

Good analogy. Especially when deaths from traffic accidents are many magnitudes higher than those from COVID-19. Statistically speaking, you are far more likely to die from traffic accidents, heart disease, stroke, diabetes, cancer, etc than you are from COVID-19. Yet apparently the only deaths that matter right now are the 0.37% dying of this virus. Hospitals are literally unavailable to people with other conditions. I wonder if anyone has even bothered to consider how many preventable deaths will occur due to difficulty in obtaining treatment for health conditions that don't happen to be COVID-19? Surgeries have been cancelled, tests have been cancelled, how many people will die as a direct result of this?

 

[JGrimez]

"I have family in France and today I learned a bit about the situation there. My aunt had surgery a few weeks ago and battles with cancer and whatnot. Get this: she is NOT allowed to leave her home, not at all! Not even to go to the supermarket or for a walk! She lives in an apartment without even a balcony! In a village in France where my family has a cottage, people are NOT allowed even to walk into the forest! This is a completely deserted place with 100 souls!! And the police is patrolling there!?! I have never seen a police car there before, ever! Another aunt and uncle live outside Paris in a rather nice suburb. They can't go further than 1km around their home! Which means they can't go to the river where they like to walk. They are NOT allowed to ride the bicycle!! And those friggin permits they have to carry... To be honest, I had no real understanding of how bad it is in France.

Now, my folks are mostly mainstream lefty types. But you know what? They now HATE Macron. With a passion. And the French are quite the revolutionaries, they are just kept in check by brute police force right now. But the anger is boiling underneath. Jesus, this country will BURN soon.

So I agree, the more extreme the measures, the more people will realize that they had been had, and they will get furious. Here in Germany, the measures are comparatively mild, yet there was already a demonstration in Berlin against the measures (immediately shut down by the police even though they kept distance and wore masks - there goes your right to protest). But we are still in the "Stockholm syndrome" phase. Not so in countries like France (and possibly other places that have a full-blown police state) as far as I can see. These people are mad, and their governments have only 2 choices: lift the measures and face a revolution, or postpone the revolution by prolonging and brutally enforcing the measures, which will make the inevitable revolution even worse. Or people simply will have to live under brutal fascism - but at least they will know then that they ARE living under brutal fascism."