Coronavirus Has Infected A 5th Of New York City, Testing Suggests

https://www.npr.org/sections/coronav...sting-suggests

cute!


https://twitter.com/jerm_cohen/statu...575107079?s=20

So the number of people that were infected (with most recovering without even knowing they were infected) is 10 times higher than what they thought it was, therefore the fatality rate is 10 times lower than what they thought it was.

Why isn't this bigger news?

^ Because that's kinda already been implied/known for months now. But we have no concrete data to confirm it.

Yes, the numbers are interesting but the concept was assumed.

We've been testing the people who seem to be infected, medical professionals, and relatively few others. We always knew that many others were infected (that's the reason for broad shutdowns) but didn't have even a decent sampling.

This really drives home the need for the shutdowns to continue...and I'd be even more leery of the average takeout place or random person on the street.

^ I would draw the opposite conclusion.

This confirms what many epidemiologists said back in February, and Angela Merkel was the first global leader to voice publicly. Most people will be infected sooner or later no matter what, and certainly before a vaccine exists.

If that’s the case, then what’s the difference if you get it next week or in 3 months? The only thing creating a risk of “excess deaths” was an overwhelmed healthcare system that led to people dying who could otherwise be saved. That risk is increasingly looking like it’s behind us, so the “herd immunity” strategy again becomes the more optimal balance between public health and economic, social and psychological damage.

Different casualties, however.

There’s a big difference between 20 year olds being killed in senseless fighting and people who are nearing or beyond average life expectancy succumbing to disease.

This is a cheesy video of someone reading a badly-written "poem" while various members of the Asheville Symphony Orchestra play their instruments from their homes.

• Video Link

Not gonna lie... When I watched it the first time, by the end I was a sobbing mess.

I find myself on the verge of tears a lot more lately.

Yeah, we all know we are banned from comparing the flu to Corona, so it goes without saying we should ban war and Corona comparisons, which make no sense.

Anyways, back to OT. My mayor has still not budged on allowing people to ride their bikes on the 18-mile lakefront trail. As soon as school ends I will be heading down to Arkansas to spend my money and enjoy life.

In fact the numbers suggest an IFR of around 1%, which is exactly where experts expected it to be. Unfortunately the media has been conflating CFRs with IFRs which has resulted in mass confusion.

No, you seem to have it backwards. Actually, the IFR seems to be as low as 0.1% from what I've seen reported (and one "expert" actually used that number on TV last night confirming my suspicion). The proven CFR remains around 1-2%, but it's all the asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic (and therefore unrecognized) infections that are raising eyebrows. We are just beginning to detect those as serologic testing ramps up.

Ended up seeing this on Reddit. Someone did a montage of St. Louis during the shutdown.

• Video Link

I do have a bit more hope for a lot of restaurants/bars here than I did before after it became temporarily legal for them to start selling pre-made cocktails to go. It's apparently been a boon to many businesses in terms of income and has certainly made takeout more enticing.

San Francisco Hilton Hotel:

https://uniim1.shutterfly.com/ng/ser...865504/enhance
Taken by a neighbor

The IFR can't be as low as 0.1 percent as more than 0.1 percent of NYC's population has died from COVID-19 (close to 0.2 percent if you include the probable deaths count from the NYC DPH). If you believe the serological study in NYC, 0.5-0.9 of those who have likely been exposed in NYC have died, and that's not accounting for those who are infected but have not died yet, bringing the likely IFR for NYC to be likely in the ~1%+ range.

NYC is the only population in the US where the false positive rate of the antibody tests is not a huge effect (since the virus is obviously more widespread in NYC than anywhere else). The Stanford study was almost certainly measuring mostly false positives (unless somehow the IFR in NYC is 10x worse than California, for some unknown reason).

more nice


https://apnews.com/fe7a9ca4e8870819474af243e8d9d233

He needs to wear a mask when outside.

Yesterday I put down some newspapers, sat my kids on them, grabbed a set of scissors, and gave them both haircuts.

Very amateur looking haircuts.

You gotta do what you gotta do, but suffice to say that our family will be having a very bad hair-month

Covid-19 has killed more Americans than died of the flu last season in the U.S.

We're not allowed to bring up the flu and corona.


Or, we weren't allowed to bring it up until the number of deaths from Corona went higher than the flu deaths?

Is that a rule on this thread? If so then moderator, please delete my comment. If not, the reason we're not talking about it anymore is because of what I stated in my comment. COVID-19 killed more people in a month than the flu in a year.

It's the leading cause of death as long as the daily toll is over about 1,900...a little over cancer and heart disease.

lol no man I am actually sorry that I made it look like a rule. I was just joking based on past conversations on here.

Funny how quickly things change, weren't there idiots just a few weeks ago trying to compare this to car deaths?

The local news down in Greenville, SC, about an hour away from where I live, steps back in time to see how their city handled things the last time we had a pandemic like this:

Opinion: How Greenville endured pandemic and quarantine in the early 1900s
By Dr. Courtney L. Tollison, Furman University

Source.

Yeah, this idiot is still doing that.

My point was very clear, but people ignored it for various reasons. We have a death rate of somewhere around 17 per 100k for car wrecks.

The point wasn't that cars are more deadly, the point was "not every life matters", according to the way we legislate. Do you think Texas did a study on how many more people would die when they raised their interstate speeds from 70 to 75? Of course they did. Obviously they found that more people would die, but they also found the economic impact was worth it. We make those types of choices(for various reasons) every day.

The point wasn't to compare death rates though, the point was to say; calm down, think about what you are doing. I think that was smart a month ago and it's smarter today. I have *yet* to hear what the endgame is besides waiting for a year for a vaccine that may never come. So yes, it is smart to compare this to other things we have control over and allow death to happen.

Even with stay at home orders, we have over 50k dead people. So we obviously make choices that still kill people. So if we were to follow a more liberal approach of the Swedes, we would be somewhere around 63k dead but we wouldn't be seeing spikes when people INEVITABLY go back outside.

I mean, what is the goal? Everyone stay home until it disappears? Not gonna happen.

In a positive sign that Chicago is flattening the curve, the make-shift emergency covid-19 care facility at Chicago's convention center has been scaled back from its original 3,000 bed capacity, down to only 1,000 beds.

Wow, this country is doing a horrible job of explaining things.

We're obviously not going to stay at home until a vaccine. My understanding is that we can open most things relatively safely if at least a couple of these happen:
1. The infection rates get low enough.
2. Mass testing is easy and fast, so we can idenity outbreaks and focus there instead of broadly.
3. We have decent treatments, which could be much sooner than a vaccine.

None of that has happened, but there's a middle ground. During an interim period where we've slowed transmissions but don't have most of the above, we can reopen some things but reduce transmission rates by:
4. Work from home when possible, and no matter what if we're sick (some jobs will need sick leave to be established, which should be mandated).
5. Focus on hygiene.
6. Limit the most obvious opportunities for large scale infection, like spectator sports.

#6 would also include Airplanes (which are still flying now). Probably movie theaters as well

NY is an outlier in almost every respect. But we'll see.

So you think the folks at Stanford are too stupid to figure out that their testing is suspect like you have?

It is gradually dawning on me that living under coronavirus is a lot like living in the Soviet Union, circa 1955. I can't get butter or margerine. I can't get toilet paper or paper towels. I can't get most cleaning supplies. I had trouble getting treats for my cat (but finally found them). Soon I may not be able to get meat or fresh veggies.

And unlike in the USSR in the old days, I can't even trudge around town with a cloth bag looking for what I need because (a) they won't let me in stores with a cloth bag and (b) it's dangerous shopping in person.

Welcome to America 2020. I wonder if they have any of the stuff I can't get in Caracas.

Yes, they didn't do the statistical analysis properly and have provided enough information to make it that obvious.

Their raw result is 50 out of 3330 tests positive (1.5%). However, they find that 2/401 of known-negative samples (combining their very limited testing and the manufacturer's) are false positives. While this point estimate is 0.5 percent, the 90-percent confidence interval on the false positive rate (using Jeffrey's interval, using Clopper-Pearson would produce a wider range due to its overcoverage) is 0.1 percent to 1.6 percent. In other words, their result is consistent with all tests being false positives yet their confidence intervals don't touch 0, so something is clearly off in their statistical reasoning. This is before considering their potentially-biased sample and questionable demogrpahic reweighting of the data. Oh and two of the authors had previously suggested everything was overblown.

I'm far from the only one to point this out. Look at https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.e...us-prevalence/ for example. edit: I suppose not everybody reads that blog. The author of the post is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Gelman

Anyway, I suppose it's possible that the IFR in NYC is 10 times higher than in California. But I doubt it.

I don't think we'll know the true picture until it's over and we can do these analyses in restrospect. For one thing, I suspect there'll be a lot of revisions about who died of the virus and who died of other things.

And I have never argued coronavirus is not a serious thing, much worse than the flu or the other things its been compared with.

By the way, comparing New York to CA, they apparently ARE different strains of the virus. I heard it said today--I think it was by Dr. Gottlieb--that there are now 4 known strains of the virus and the Chinese strain prevalent in CA is different from the European strain prevalent in NY. So they could have different IFRs and other differences (but I agree, probably nothing like 10 times though as a Californian, I can hope so).

I think you're right. But a lot of what I am seeing is that people think the only way to reopen things is to be 100% safe. I keep seeing that "social distancing is working" while 50k people are dead. Now, I am smart enough(barely) to understand that the 50k could be higher if we did nothing or less than we did anyways. However, from the articles and by what people are saying on social media it seems like people don't want to even go outside until there is either a vaccine or the amount of deaths go to zero. I mean, there was a heated debate on if a DRIVE-IN movie theater is safe to open. These are the incredibly stupid conversations Americans are having. This leads me to believe the first three things you pointed out aren't the only metric.

I also keep seeing stories of young people terrified to leave their house. The Washington Post article from yesterday gave me a good view on what a lot of people are going through. For example, a Georgia girl visited a guy in Virginia that she met on Bumble. It was supposed to only be a "one-time hookup" but shes been there for over a month now and only leaves his room to cook and use the bathroom, carefully listening to the dudes roommates coughing. Another story features a 29 year old terrified to even walk outside. He met some girl online and they had 8 "virtual dates" and have thought about meeting up in person. But the girl stated "she wants to meet him, but doesn't want to die", even during a "socially distanced walk together.

20 something folks in this country are scared to death to go outside, leave a room, or think a social distance walk with someone will kill them. There has been a MASSIVE misinformation campaign out there that has filtered through to all the idiots.

I saw a girl the other day post a graphic showing some states(I forgot) death count by week and it said "for all you open people, I'll leave this right here." It literally showed that the deaths per week were going down. When I mentioned this to the girl she said "but the deaths keep on racking up!" Ummm, well they aren't going to go down lady.

Edit: I just read a story from CNN that has this line: "...a number of states have begun to loosen stay-at-home restrictions--even as the novel coronavirus continues to infect and kill people." The obvious conclusion one *should reach by that line is that we shouldn't loosen restrictions until there is no more infections and death. It didn't say "as the deaths rate per week continues to climb" or "as the week over week number of cases continues to increase by 80%" or something. It simply left it at NO OPEN FOR YOU UNTIL NO DEATH OR CASES.

Surely, you aren't suggesting we stop air travel?

Yes, very much yes indeed.

We will soon have a hard time getting meat.

But if we start having a shortage of beer/wine, I will openly revolt

We're not seeing shortages in anything, really. Are people really having difficulty finding basic goods?

I think we once couldn't get disinfectant wipes. That's it.

Went to the supermarket yesterday. Still no toilet paper on the shelves in south bay Safeway(which doesn’t necessarily mean they aren’t stored in the back for customer request).

I haven't had trouble finding anything since the initial ~2 weeks in mid-March when people went crazy on toilet paper and paper towels.

Meat is still well-supplied in the grocery stores I've been to. For the past year my parents have been using a new delivery service from a group that locally sources meat from across Southern Ontario. In normal times, they would do a delivery every Monday. Now they're mostly doing bulk orders of 3+ months worth of product for people to load up their deep freezers. The guy said they would normally expect to do about 300 of these type of deliveries a month, and in April they're booked for 750...

I'm hoping this is actually a positive side effect of the whole ordeal. That people who have the means to can revert to more local supply chains.

With that particular market, I think you may be right. However, with 99% of other products people buy(nonfood), it will become less and less local.

Why can’t you go in stores with a cloth bag?

And you’ll be able to get meat and veggies if you shop at the right places. It’s the Smithfield/Tyson factory crap that has supply chain issues, not your local farmers’ market.

Laurent Duvernay-Tardif of the Kansas City Chiefs (also a doctor - the first-ever NFL player to become one) has responded to Quebec Premier François Legault's all-hands-on-deck plea and is working in a long-term care facility - which have been hit extremely hard by COVID-19 here. He didn't want the news to get out - but of course it did.

(Beijing) Olympic figure skating medallist Joannie Rochette is also a (very) freshly-minted doctor and has also jumped into the fray by working in a long-term care residence.

I'm extremely skeptical that we can return to something that even remotely resembles full contact interaction without a way to rapidly test people, at scale. The absence of reliable ways to quickly identify and isolate outbreaks is the only reason that we've had to shut down at all. If we always knew who was infected, and who those people were in contact with, then there would never have been a reason to drastically alter our behavior.

Yes. I’m trying not to shop myself and using Instacart but twice now the “shopper” couldn’t find multiple items on my lists including a pound of margerine (he brought me half a pound of a brand I would never buy in normal times). Even the convenience stores are out.

Finally I went myself to the store, all masked and gloved. No TP or paper towels or “wipes” or really any cleaning products on the shelves.

I don’t think we’ve seen the meat and produce shortages yet. According to the WSJ that’ll be in about 2 weeks. They are “euthanizing” hogs in Iowa and chickens in Maryland/Delaware because the processing plants are closed. Farmers are letting veggies rot in the fields—yesterday I saw a really depressing photo of dead strawberry plants—because nobody to pick or process them or haul them to grocery stores.

They are now banning reusable bags because they are getm carriers it’s been discovered. In San Francisco they now charge $0.10 per bag for plastic ones to encourage reusable ones except now the reusable ones are banned. No choice I guess but pay the $010.

Even the local farmers market depends on commercial contract meat processors, albeit small, local ones, and immigrant farm labor to pick crops. The processors are closing one by one and the farm labor is vanishing. Besides, where I live the farmers markets closed for lack of business—everybody’s holed up at home.

Shouldn't have much of an effect here in CA, since most of our produce and meats are grown locally.

http://www.seecalifornia.com/farms/c...awberries.html

https://www.bizjournals.com/sanfranc...VpSEo5V2RzSiJ9

*Clover Stornetta is a local dairy whose products are carried in most upscale and "heath-oriented" markets.

Doesn't matter how locally they are grown if there's insufficient labor to pick them or process them or transport them. See above about Clover Stornetta which, if you live in the Bay Area, I'm sure you know.

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/0...ge-agriculture

Haven't seen a shortage of food yet. Initially eggs were being sold out quickly, but the demand has died down. Certain more boutique brands of flour are hard to find, but standard issue flour is easy to procure. As far as I can tell, this is more due to higher demand, not shortage in supply.

And yes, I am very familiar with Clover, Straus, Cowgirl, et al. These are Bay Area staples.