Many Scientists Warn CDC's New Death Rate Estimates Far Too Low (buzzfeednews.com) 151
Slashdot reader DevNull127 quotes Buzzfeed News: Public health experts are accusing the CDC of bending under political pressure to say the coronavirus is less deadly. New CDC estimates of coronavirus death rates look suspiciously low and present almost no data to back them up, say public health experts who are concerned that the agency is buckling under political pressure to restart the economy...
While no one yet knows the coronavirus's actual death rate, the agency's range of possible rates seemed alarmingly low to many epidemiologists, compared to existing data in places both inside and outside the US. For instance, estimates of New York City's total death rate, 0.86% to 0.93%, are even higher than the CDC's worst-case scenario. Estimates from countries like Spain and Italy are also higher, ranging from 1.1% to 1.3%. Researchers also lambasted the CDC's lack of transparency about its data sources. The eight-page document disclosed almost nothing about its numbers, citing only internal data and a preprint — a study that has not been peer-reviewed — led by scientists in Iran. "This is terrible. This is way too optimistic," Andrew Noymer, an associate professor of population health at the University of California at Irvine, told BuzzFeed News, adding, "With this document, the CDC is determined to smash its credibility with the public health community of which it is supposedly a leader."
The CDC did not return multiple requests for comment...
A preliminary analysis of more than two dozen studies from Europe, China, the US, and elsewhere, conducted by Meyerowitz-Katz and colleague Lea Merone, suggests that the overall infection fatality rate is between 0.5% and 0.78%. Even the lower end of that range is higher than what the CDC says is its "best estimate" for the rate, which is about 0.26%. The CDC's proposed fatality rates "are more in line with a relatively mild seasonal flu season than with COVID-19," said Gerardo Chowell, a public health expert at Georgia State University. Those estimates are at least an order of magnitude lower than ones elsewhere in the world, he added, including South Korea, which has a case fatality rate around 0.7% and one of the highest testing rates for the coronavirus in the world....
The CDC document provided almost no sources for its projections, making it impossible for scientists to understand how it came up with them.
While no one yet knows the coronavirus's actual death rate, the agency's range of possible rates seemed alarmingly low to many epidemiologists, compared to existing data in places both inside and outside the US. For instance, estimates of New York City's total death rate, 0.86% to 0.93%, are even higher than the CDC's worst-case scenario. Estimates from countries like Spain and Italy are also higher, ranging from 1.1% to 1.3%. Researchers also lambasted the CDC's lack of transparency about its data sources. The eight-page document disclosed almost nothing about its numbers, citing only internal data and a preprint — a study that has not been peer-reviewed — led by scientists in Iran. "This is terrible. This is way too optimistic," Andrew Noymer, an associate professor of population health at the University of California at Irvine, told BuzzFeed News, adding, "With this document, the CDC is determined to smash its credibility with the public health community of which it is supposedly a leader."
The CDC did not return multiple requests for comment...
A preliminary analysis of more than two dozen studies from Europe, China, the US, and elsewhere, conducted by Meyerowitz-Katz and colleague Lea Merone, suggests that the overall infection fatality rate is between 0.5% and 0.78%. Even the lower end of that range is higher than what the CDC says is its "best estimate" for the rate, which is about 0.26%. The CDC's proposed fatality rates "are more in line with a relatively mild seasonal flu season than with COVID-19," said Gerardo Chowell, a public health expert at Georgia State University. Those estimates are at least an order of magnitude lower than ones elsewhere in the world, he added, including South Korea, which has a case fatality rate around 0.7% and one of the highest testing rates for the coronavirus in the world....
The CDC document provided almost no sources for its projections, making it impossible for scientists to understand how it came up with them.
They re making up for all that... (Score:1)
...by calling any death accompanied by even a suspected COVID infection, a COVID death
Re: They re making up for all that... (Score:5, Insightful)
Turn it around instead - if you look at the averages for the same period previous years and then the number of deaths this year, then almost all 'excess' deaths are likely Covid-19 since we haven't had any other major death factor around.
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Wait until we start having old and repeat deaths! Shits gonna get real after that!
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So Zombie Apocalypse FTW.
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Re: They re making up for all that... (Score:5, Insightful)
"Except for all the people who died because they were told not to come in to hospitals. Here are two cases of people who died of malaria because doctors thought they had COVID and told them not to come in: https://news.ycombinator.com/i... [ycombinator.com]"
If the cause of death is known then they will not be counted as excess deaths due to Covid-19.
If the cause of death is not known it can still be possible to arrive at a good estimate of how many deaths of the excess deaths are due to Covid and many are due to other causes.
Also, especially for places like New York, how many deaths are due to patients not getting appropriate care because of hospital overcrowding due to Covid cases can also taken into account.
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Sorry, but it doesn't work that way.
If you are basing your estimates purely on excess deaths, then the official cause of death isn't even considered. And that is going to count people who didn't go the the hospital because of COVID. Of course, it's also going to reflect people who didn't die in a traffic accident because they stayed home. The uncertainty is reasonably large. But the official statistics are garbage. Either they overcount or undercount, the only way around that would be to test all the c
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"If you are basing your estimates purely on excess deaths, then the official cause of death isn't even considered. And that is going to count people who didn't go the the hospital because of COVID. Of course, it's also going to reflect people who didn't die in a traffic accident because they stayed home."
Why base it purely on excess deaths.
"The uncertainty is reasonably large. But the official statistics are garbage ... Simple answers have only one guarantee: they're wrong"
I'm not saying simplistic answers
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The reason you use excess deaths is because that's relatively easy to calculate, and a pretty reliable statistic. Once you blend it with some other statistic then you've made it more difficult to calculate and with a less reliable error bound.
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"The reason you use excess deaths is because that's relatively easy to calculate, and a pretty reliable statistic"
I agree, it's meaningful on it's own.
"Once you blend it with some other statistic then you've made it more difficult to calculate and with a less reliable error bound"
Yes, but it doesn't mean gathering more specific data on excess deaths can't be useful or produce meaningful results.
Re: They re making up for all that... (Score:2)
Do you REALLY think these spikes are from people not going to a hospital... seriously?
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/... [cdc.gov]
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If you are dingily sick and don't go into a hospital, or have no relatives that brig you, then I would say: Evolution at Work.
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If a hospital is overwhelmed and unable to treat patients because of COVID, how do you categorize all of the ancillary deaths? Keep in mind that many treatable conditions can lead to death if not treated in a timely manner.
If someone brings a bomb into a hospital and takes a hostage--ultimately killing the hostage--causing the hospital to go into lock-down and disrupting the care of patients, is that person responsible for the deaths of any of the untreated patients or only the hostage that dies at their h
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"These are difficult questions that are clearly up for debate"
There are a lot of factors that need to be considered some more significant than others when looking at excess death statistics, but as HiThere said excess deaths numbers in themselves are still meaningful.
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I see so many conversations where people take a hard position regarding how to tally the statistics. It is clear that some people draw the line in order to bolster their political view. It is a shame that this has to even be political, but these are the times we are living in. I believe that it is important to take as many strict measures as you can such as diagnosed COVID deaths, likely related diagnosed deaths, along with deaths by other specific causes. These should all be measured in historical cont
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Well, there are some cases of that, but overall they do not matter. It is tiny number vastly exaggerated by the usual idiots.
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Well, you may be a perfect match for the _stupid_ part of the "community" there. I think you primary goal is just to seed as much discord as possible.
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"We can't expect article writers to understand anything about these number ... The media wants us to 'use science', but then completely ignore or misinterpret what numbers mean when presented"
Wrapping your comment in emotional negativity tells me what your saying is very likely to be irrelevant or at best unreliable.
The big take away form the article is simply this:
"New CDC estimates of coronavirus death rates ... present almost no data to back them up ... making it impossible for scientists to understand h
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"So, the basis these 'experts' have for disagreeing with the number is that they don't have the data needed to disagree? That's some fine experting there buddy."
No, the 'experts' question the new number because it doesn't come with the data needed to explain why it's lower than it used to be.
Buddy ??? :)
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The 'experts' that keep claiming the death rate is HIGHER than stated keep being proved wrong...
My apologies.
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"The 'experts' that keep claiming the death rate is lower than reality keep being proved wrong. When it was supposedly 5% they were saying it might be much higher. Then when it was 3% they lambasted Trump for saying it was probably lower than 1%"
Who are 'they'. It's hard to believe they are really experts if they're making all those claims.
"And there's people like you that decide your are only skeptical of those claiming lower numbers, despite being PROVEN wrong all along the way so far. I suppose now "its
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They based their consideration of Trump's comment on his penchant for pulling "facts" out of his ass. He's a congenital liar. Why would anyone believe anything he says?
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"The 'experts' that keep claiming the death rate is lower [edit: higher] than reality keep being proved wrong. When it was supposedly 5% they were saying it might be much higher. Then when it was 3% they lambasted Trump for saying it was probably lower than 1%"
The death rate has decreased over time as doctors have gotten better at treating it. Those experts were correct at the time; no new data has changed the statistics about how many people were dying during the first couple of months.
And the people saying it might be much higher were saying that if hospitals became overwhelmed, it could become much higher. Quick action by hundreds of millions of people prevented hospitals from becoming overwhelmed, so that worst-case scenario did not occur. Again, that does
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"The death rate has decreased over time as doctors have gotten better at treating it. Those experts were correct at the time; no new data has changed the statistics about how many people were dying during the first couple of months."
I think the death rate they are referring to in the article, the virus' death rate, how many people who catch covid-19 will die, has always been pretty much the same but because at the start most tests were done on clearly sick people, and over time more and more test are done o
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"The death rate has decreased over time as doctors have gotten better at treating it. Those experts were correct at the time; no new data has changed the statistics about how many people were dying during the first couple of months."
I think the death rate they are referring to in the article, the virus' death rate, how many people who catch covid-19 will die, has always been pretty much the same but because at the start most tests were done on clearly sick people, and over time more and more test are done on less symptomatic people and even people who have no symptoms at all (but also test positive), the death rate of the virus has dropped, becoming closer and closer to the actual virus' death rate.
That would be the CFR approaching the IFR. And yes, that almost invariably happens. But the percentage of hospitalized patients who die is also falling pretty significantly, which tells us that doctors are learning a lot.
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no, they disagree with the number because it is suspiciously low compared to several other reviewed studies that do provide credible sources. rtfs.
that the cdc provides no sources just makes their claims moot, and adds considerably to the suspicion that they might have pulled the numbers out of their butts or are simply misreporting.
Re: They re making up for all that... (Score:2)
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"how such data must be properly presented with the associated assumptions, criteria, and normalization info to come with it, all of which is needed to allow users to interpret it properly."
No disagreement there.
"It doesn't need to be in public report format to use it properly for their estimations"
What do you mean by "public report-format" and who are you refering to by "their estimations"?
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In addition to this, there is a difference between epidemiologists and regular people on the definition of "Death rate".
Because they are useful in different ways
Normal people would assume out of population x, y die, so the death rate would be (y/x)*100%
During an outbreak this number is only ever going to go up as more people die.
It's not going to tell you what your chances of survival are if you get the virus until the very end. 1, 2, 3, 6, 10, 20, 40.
Gee everyone is infected and 40% of people died. Guess we should have done something earlier. Oh well too late now it's over.
Epidemiologists have tunnel vision to the epidemic, so out of population x, z get sick, and y die, so their death rate is (y/z)*100%.
You will get a graph like this [ourworldindata.org] We can already see it's not going to kill 40% of everyone. We don't need to wait until the end to find out.
Bu
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We'll know how real it is in two weeks if we see a protest spike.
Seems low (Score:4, Informative)
Right now, the US statistics are 102856 deaths and 1748705 confirmed cases, for a 5.9% death rate of CONFIRMED cases.
(data: https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/ma... [jhu.edu] ).
But the number of tests is limited, and hence the actual number of cases is much larger than the number of confirmed cases (and including the fact that 30-50% of the cases show no symptoms at all).
The CDC's "best guess" estimate of 0.26% can only be accurate if for every confirmed case in the U.S., there are 22.6 actual cases.
That seems a little high to me.
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The numbers are pretty clear in Australia. Want better numbers, do what they did in Australia years ago, inoculate the population for TB, it seems to have worked really well, yet for some reason, everyone seems to want to ignore reality in this case. If you have been inoculated for TB than you a pretty safe, if you have not, then get that decades old inoculation for TB all indications are that it works well in preventing covid 19 from triggering pneumonia, the old fashioned name for SARS - 'suddenly acquire
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Having every 10-14yr old between 1953 and 1988 given BCG in the UK doesn't seem to have stopped it having the worlds highest fatality/mil stats. A vaccine believed to protect for only up to 15 years here anyway.
Like lots of things it is being tested as a treatment and prophylactic, speculative testing is no guarantee of anything.
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Well, if there's one thing we've learned in this pandemic it's that getting the numbers to look good is the most important thing.
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NYC has 16k confirmed deaths and 200k confirmed cases on a population of 8M (0.2% and 2.5% of the population). That's really not consistent with 0.26% IFR and given that about 25% of the NYC population has antibodies. Based on antibody occurrence, NYC has 0.8% IFR.
Re:Seems low (Score:4, Insightful)
I see all this arguing without accounting for simple and obvious factors. Nobody ever cares about data normalization, I think many don't even know what it means yat argue away with comparative statistics.
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I see all this arguing without accounting for simple and obvious factors. Nobody ever cares about data normalization, I think many don't even know what it means yat argue away with comparative statistics.
When looking at a blended population like a city in this case, ( or a country ) the data are already normalized due to the huge sample size. You don't need to restrict or normalize data for example for age ranges / nursing home occupancy unless the city or country is outside the mean of other cities or countries in the area being studied. When looking at overall statistics of a whole population you will not have to normalize for age ranges until you are looking at the statistics for those specific ranges. W
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When looking at a blended population like a city in this case, ( or a country ) the data are already normalized due to the huge sample size.
This is absolutely incorrect, perfectly demonstrating the lack of statistical insight in the general public I spoke of.
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No, what I said is 100% correct. If you are looking at what affects a population you absolutely do NOT intentionally control for data variables that are already equalized across the population sample. That's called data manipulation. If we look for "deaths in the U.S. population" it would be disingenuous to inflate or deflate any ranges in the data. We are looking for the statistics on what happens to a blended population, so we can make the logical informed assumption that any minor outliers like a retirem
Asymptomatic precentage [Re:Seems low] (Score:2)
First, the CDC page we're discussing explicitly did not use those numbers. Their best estimate is in the article discussed; it was that 30% of cases were asymptomatic. The high end of their range was 50%. This is in line with most other studies.
Second, the references you give are talking about people who are " contagious but not [yet] physically sick" -- this includes both asymptomatic cases, and also people who are infected but haven't yet developed symptoms.
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Sure. It would just require that extreme value (96%) is true, and also that testing almost never detects an asymptomatic case.
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Up to around 80% [healthline.com], and in some studies 96% [reuters.com] of all CoVID-19 infected are asymptomatic.
No, you mis-read. Being unaware they have the virus is not the same as being asymptomatic. Lots of people are saying "it is just a cough and sniffle".
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Up to around 80% [healthline.com], and in some studies 96% [reuters.com] of all CoVID-19 infected are asymptomatic.
You've been pushing [slashdot.org] that [slashdot.org] lie [slashdot.org] hard for over a month now Lynnwood.
Isn't it about time to get some new material?
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This is a schizophrenic virus, or there really are two of them. Here in Washington State we currently have 21071 cases with 1111 deaths which is 5%. But Thurston county has 133 cases with only one death. And there are multiple counties that haven't had any deaths yet. The virus can't even find Garfield county. It definitely is not an open country bug.
The other odd thing in Washington is that it is disproportionately killing white people. Hispanics are significantly under represented, possibly because the o
Rural hospitals... are not involved. (Score:2)
In my state, the failing rurall hospitals have no Covid-19. why? Because we sent all cases into the CITY to deal with them leaving whatever they had for healthcare free to deal with everything else. We even have taken in cases from neighboring states where our city hospitals were closer.
This is skewing the stats towards the city further and the red necks into feeling safer than they are.
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That is not the way they are counting here. The statistics list where you live, not where you end up in a hospital. The first death here in Grant County was listed as a Grant County death even though the woman died in the hospital in Chelan county. Obviously I can't speak for how they count them where you live.
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I should modify that post slightly; there's a difference between the death rate of people infected, and the death rate of people who show symptoms.
The "best estimate" on the CDC scenario page being discussed [cdc.gov] is that the death rate is 0.4% of the symptomatic cases, and 35% of all cases are asymptomatic, the total death rate of infected people is 0.3%.
So, the difference between CDC numbers and the current numbers for the U.S. [jhu.edu] is not due to an assumption of the number of asymptomatic cases, since they explicit
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The problem is that "show symptoms". It seems plausible that the primary action of COVID is on the walls of the blood vessels, and that this can lead in some cases to small circulating blood clots. These can produce all sorts of different symptoms, including many that are not usually associated with COVID. You don't hear much of strokes or kidney failure being associated with COVID, but those can be the only sign of it's presence that is visible without a test. There's a huge number of "rare diseases" t
The CDC has been compromised (Score:3, Insightful)
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I'm sorry, but your link doesn't appear to point to a WHO site. Perhaps you mistyped the link.
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didn't you hear? china is lying!
Re: The CDC has been compromised (Score:1)
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Name a government that hasn't been lying during this pandemic. Even one. It sure isn't the US.
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And yes, our business doesn't use masks because of their recommendations, as well.
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Also the same WHO that 12 months ago declared excessive computer game playing as a mental disease.
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No, just the WHO which gave sound advice based on the data which was provided to them by governments, the same WHO which are not allowed to use any other data for their decision making.
Also the WHO that in no way has ever stated that masks aren't helpful and quite the opposite has stated and continue to currently state that it is important that masks are reserved for people in direct contact with COVID patients and not be randomly distributed to everyone thus creating a shortage and compromising a medical s
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Well, IIRC at one point they stated that there was no evidence that masks were helpful. Some people don't understand the "subtle" difference in the meaning.
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Well, IIRC at one point they stated that there was no evidence that masks were helpful. Some people don't understand the "subtle" difference in the meaning.
You don't recall correctly. That was CDC, not WHO.
Feels like China (Score:2)
Can't have Winnie-the Pooh make a temper tantrum, so report what he wants to hear, even if in this case it ain't a bear but an orange-utan.
TFA is wrong (Score:4, Informative)
The CDC's worst-case scenarios [cdc.gov] (scenarios 3 and 4) are a 1.0% fatality rate. Last I checked, 1.0% is higher than 0.93%, not the other way around. Scenarios 1 and 2 (best case) are 0.2%. And their "best estimate" based on data they're getting from the states is 0.4%.
The problem here isn't the CDC bending to someone's political will. The problem is the media not fully reporting the facts, and bandying the 0.4% 'best estimate" rate as if it were final and absolute with zero uncertainty. Go to the link I gave above. See what the CDC is saying from the horse's mouth, not from someone in the media trying to make it look like the CDC is bowing to pressure. The CDC gave a fairly large range (0.2% - 1.0%) which is not inconsistent with all the other expert estimates I've seen.
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The CDC's worst-case scenarios [cdc.gov] (scenarios 3 and 4) are a 1.0% fatality rate.
I'm not sure that these are not different things.
You're quoting the CDC planning scenario's estimates of death rate of symptomatic cases. To get the total death rate, you need to multiply by the ratio of total cases to symptomatic cases. This would mean the CDC's worst case (which assumes 20% asymptomatic) is 0.8%, which is (as stated) lower than 0.86%. (their best estimate is 35% asymptomatic, but the "worst case" for death rate could come at the lowest asymptomatic ratio).
21,477 coronavirus deaths in NYC so far (Score:5, Interesting)
That's about 0.26% of NYC's entire population of 8.4 million people. So even if all of NYC is infected, the infection fatality rate is still at least 0.26%. Antibody tests taken from NYC grocery store customers have ~20% positive rate. Assuming that's representative of the entire population, the actual NYC infection fatality rate is ~1.3%.
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I'm not sure that's really NY's population - do they make sure to only count people *from* NYC proper and not greater metro area?
Not that I think this bickering about exact percentages really matters.
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These are only the coronavirus deaths in NYC. NYC suburbs like Nassau and Westchester counties are counted separately and they also have high numbers of deaths.
Also, the actual NYC population right now is likely quite a bit less than the 8.4 million estimate from before the pandemic. Large numbers of New Yorkers have fled the city and many apartment buildings in Manhattan are half empty.
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That's about 0.26% of NYC's entire population of 8.4 million people. So even if all of NYC is infected, the infection fatality rate is still at least 0.26%. Antibody tests taken from NYC grocery store customers have ~20% positive rate. Assuming that's representative of the entire population, the actual NYC infection fatality rate is ~1.3%.
And that ignores the large number of excess deaths in the area, at least some of which are directly caused by COVID-19 (as opposed to indirectly cause, e.g. by people avoiding going to the hospital when they need to, or suicides caused by depression from lockdown, etc.).
Cuomo'd (Score:3, Insightful)
Quick! Find another apocalypse! (Score:1, Insightful)
Hell hath no fury like activists who find out that the apocalypse they're promoting is not as apocalyptic as they first thought.
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See, that's the beauty! By the time the riots finally end, there will be tens of thousands of new CoVID-19 cases, and we can keep the country-wide PANIC going... You have to look at the big picture!
I'm just surprised they burned down the buildings they did; I thought for sure the targets would be polling stations, to further the push for mail-in-voting nation-wide only... Someone didn't really think it all through very well.
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I'm just surprised they burned down the buildings they did; I thought for sure the targets would be polling stations
No, no, you have to time it so that the polling stations are only destroyed when there isn't enough time to repair/replace them.
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1) It's not an apocalypse if there is lasting immunity, or if a second case is milder than the first. (This is often true, though not always, but preliminary results indicate that it is true in this case.)
2) It's still a major problem and needs dealing with properly.
3) Because our medical systems are (at best) sized to deal with the normal level of problems, it requires strong measures to enable them to handle things without collapsing, yielding a much worse outcome.
N.B.: The "lockdown" measures have prev
Stupid Article (Score:2)
This article is really fucking stupid.
No one is claiming that the *case* fatality is 0.26%. The CDC is saying that the *infection* fatality is 0.26.
The *case* fatality in south korea is around 0.7. The infection fatality rate can only be lower.
The number of *cases* is really of low informational value, because it is mainly determined be the number of tests and by who is tested.
The 0.26 comes from antibody studies and matches the Age-Corrected result of the Heinzberg-Study among many others.
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Addition:
And the infection fatality rate deducted from antibody-studies does not take into account that some people do not develop the antibodies that are being detected (Maybe none, maybe different antibodies / cross immunity).
I have seen estimates ranging from 30%-80% of people not developing those antibodies that are still immune.
Primarly children are suspected not to develop antibodies.
Overall fatality rate if everyone is probably as low as 0.05%
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So, if New York State has 30,000 deaths. If the actual fatality rate is 0.26%, then the number of infected people in NY State is about 11.5 million, which is over 57% of the population. For the fatality rate to be 0.05%, it would mean that there would have to be 60 million infected in NY State. This is 3 times the population of the state.
The overall infection fatality rate (Score:2)
The overall infection fatality rate is not very informative when outcomes depend so heavily on factors, such as age, access to treatment and general well-being. Different localities have different age distributions and risk factors. In New York City, people in the Bronx have fared much worse than those in Manhattan. In New York State, 20% of fatalities were nursing home residents, even though the nursing home population is nowhere close to 20%. It just doesn't make sense to use a single number (total death
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Simple flow chart (Score:1)
Use EITHER data question 1 or 2: (your choice)
Data question 1: "Does what I'm hearing disagree with my personal feelings?
Data question 2: "Does this information appear to validate Donald Trump in any way?"
No: "It is a clear, concise, science-based and data-driven conclusion.
Yes: "Clearly (source) has been politically compromised and is only spouting conclusions to serve a greater agenda.
And Trump blasts China for fudging numbers?? (Score:2)
Then you have the president (the Head of State, the Big Cheese) denying there is a crisis for weeks, then advocates stupid cures,
And Trump is blaming China?
It looks to me US is trying the 1918 playbook - flu starts in US, don't tell anyone; wait for Spain to do something, call it the Spanish Flu. In the present
The Trump administration ruined the CDC (Score:2)
The Trump administration ruined the CDC.
That is why The Lancet is calling for the CDC to be revived [thelancet.com].
Deaths are undercounted (Score:5, Informative)
Incorrect. For a long time the CDC rules were that a death was not counted as COVID-19 unless the infection had been documented by a test... and the tests were unavailable. So many-- some suggest most-- of the death toll was not counted.
The actual number of deaths (compared to a "normal" year) shows that the death rate is apparently severely undercounted, not overcounted.
There is a lot of documentation of this. If you think most of the media is biased, here is the Wall Street Journal: https://www.wsj.com/articles/m... [wsj.com]
(the fivethirtyeight article is good, too: https://fivethirtyeight.com/fe... [fivethirtyeight.com] , and the USAToday article a nice short summary https://www.usatoday.com/story... [usatoday.com] )
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The numbers have not been consistent at all New York City retroactively added a few thousand people they suspected of COVID-19 over the past months, in a single day. That was on the Johns Hopkins data (https://github.com/CSSEGISandData/COVID-19/issues/2257) but that's another issue .. just inconsistency between CDC, Johns Hopkins, U Washington and the other data sources. All of them are different.
Re: Deaths are undercounted (Score:5, Informative)
Serology surveys and excess death counts compared to the previous two calendar years all show the death count has been overestimated.
You somehow got that backwards: the excess death counts show that the number of deaths attributed to COVID-19 have been undercounted.
These are the two most reliable methods for tracking.
Yep. And they show death count due to the virus is low.
Again: this data is well documented. Here, for example, is the CDC page https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volum... [cdc.gov]
and here is a somewhat more accessible page https://ourworldindata.org/exc... [ourworldindata.org]
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Poe's Law is strong with this one.
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Serology surveys and excess death counts compared to the previous two calendar years all show the death count has been overestimated. These are the two most reliable methods for tracking.
Get an American phone that has proper auto correct. "Serology" - that passes on Cyrillic phones.
Re:Many Scientists On the Take Estimate. . . (Score:5, Funny)
My 88 year-old mother, who is not in such a facility, has been fine.
My 80 something parents and in-laws are totally fine. It's obvious that the COVID-19 is nothing but a hoax. All those deaths reported are phony. Nobody I know has died from this so it obviously a fake. As a matter of fact, my grandpa died at 90 from old age. He smoked and a drank and he still died! So, obviously smoking and drinking do no harm.
This is some partisan hackery, this is.
It sure is. We all know that this virus was created to make Trump look bad.
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"far less lethal than originally feared" isn't even a basis for discussion because it doesn't even mean anything.
Indeed. But you need working mental facilities to see that. These are in short supply.
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Need those clicks!
If no one has realized it yet... the media likes to hype issues because it gets eyeballs.
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I think you feel you've made a valid argument, but it doesn't make any sense to me.
Why should protests be any sign that there isn't a real problem?
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IIRC, what the CDC were trying to do was discourage people in non-medical surroundings from using N95 masks. This was (and is) quite reasonable, and is much different from the "face coverings" or "surgical masks" which are in common use currently, and is what they are recommending.
P.S.: Your links don't prove your point. You need to link to a statement by Trump to show what Trump was claiming when.
P.P.S.: Most people who wear an N95 mask will soon stop wearing it, because it makes it too hard to breathe