The Wuhan virus—how are we doing? - Page 2 - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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Provision of the two UN HDI indicators other than GNP.
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#15094519
Doug64 wrote:It looks like the ones really at risk are the elderly in nursing homes


The average life expectancy in nursing homes is 30 months(2½ years), and you gotta figure that the nursing home patients that died from covid were in pretty bad shape already so they had considerably less than the average of 30 months left to live.

The retardation on this one has been truly spectacular.
#15094524
Kaiserschmarrn wrote:An FT reporter does weekly updates of excess deaths on Twitter (see pinned tweet) which provide a good perspective that doesn't depend on the level of testing.

One question that the overall numbers don't answer is how many of those excess deaths are due to the Wuhan virus, and how many are due to people not having access to medical services or are afraid to access them.

The results of the Spanish antibody study, which to my knowledge is the largest to date, also show that about a third of cases is asymptomatic, so I don't think this parameter is necessarily too low.

That said, I tried to find sources at the link to see on what basis they made this assessment, but as with all the other data there don't seem to be any. Quite poor for a study by a public body in my view.

Another parameter of interest is their best fatality rate estimate which seems very optimistic, with an overall implied IFR of 0.27% and an IFR for the 65+ age group of 0.87%. Again, would really like to see the data they're working with, but they don't seem to provide it.

The numbers I've seen from admittedly not-exactly-rigorous-or-universal studies in the US ran from 50% asymptomatic to as high as 98%. Of course the latter was in a prison where the population would be (very) disproportionately younger and healthier, which is where the less-than-univseral part comes in....
Sivad wrote:The average life expectancy in nursing homes is 30 months(2½ years), and you gotta figure that the nursing home patients that died from covid were in pretty bad shape already so they had considerably less than the average of 30 months left to live.

The retardation on this one has been truly spectacular.

Yeah, one question I haven't seen an answer to is how much of the age statistics is due to age, and how much is due to health issues that are just more common with age.
#15094526
Doug64 wrote:One question that the overall numbers don't answer is how many of those excess deaths are due to the Wuhan virus, and how many are due to people not having access to medical services or are afraid to access them.



The CDC is saying around 25% but other experts have it at over 60%.
#15094543
Beating up the numbers: The loose definition and inflated tally of COVID-19 deaths

Another reflects what Elizabeth Pisani, a former epidemiologist for the WHO and other agencies, has called “beat-ups,” as in “beating up the numbers.” In her book, The Wisdom of Whores: Bureaucrats, Brothels, and the Business of AIDS, she says of drastically inflated predictions, “We did it consciously. I think all of us at that time thought that the beat-ups were more than justified, they were necessary” to get donors and governments to care.

https://justthenews.com/politics-policy ... oronavirus



Two thirds of coronavirus victims may have died this year anyway, government adviser says
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/0 ... ar-anyway/
#15094549
Sivad wrote:Two thirds of coronavirus victims may have died this year anyway, government adviser says
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/0 ... ar-anyway/


While I agree with this analysis, the remaining one-third still has to be looked into. Besides, Wuhan Pneumonia Virus is still uncharted territory. Therefore, people fearing themselves catching it and most of those measures taken are still justified.

It is wrong to suggest the numbers being exaggerated based on this information. Anyone dying from the disease is someone dying from the disease. Whether the person in concern would be dying otherwise is irrelevant.
#15094658
Another interesting bit of news that, if it pans out, could have a major impact on our plans going forward:

Bombshell study: Could half the uninfected population already be partially immune?

    Could nearly half the population not already infected with SARS-CoV-2 be immune to it from having already contracted other forms of coronavirus in recent years?

    That is one implication of a major study conducted by over a dozen researchers from several microbiology and immunology institutions in the U.S.

    The purveyors of panic are warning of a second wave of the virus and that even if we are correct in asserting that the general fatality rate is extremely low for most people, it will still result in millions of deaths worldwide if we need 70 percent of the population to get the virus in order to achieve herd immunity. Putting aside the fact that their strategy of lockdown doesn’t provide a solution to this hypothetical problem either, even as it kills more people from the collateral damage, there is now promising evidence that more people might already be immune to the virus.

    The study is built upon the principle that T cells play a central role in destroying viruses and providing immunity. Not only were these cells discovered in all the blood samples of confirmed recovered COVID-19 patients, but they were also found in 6 of the 11 blood samples from 2015-2018, before those individual donors could possibly have contracted the virus.

    Until now, the assumption was that only those with IgG or IgM antibodies can be immune because they are the ones who have already contracted the disease. However, this study examined the cellular defenses that are created in the body and have been proven to serve as a defense against SARS-CoV-2, then discovered them among 40%-60% of their samples not infected with SARS-CoV-2.

    In order to prove the efficacy of these T cells developed in the recovered population, the researchers exposed immune cells from 10 recovered patients to the virus. They found those cells effectively fight the virus. 100% of the samples of 20 donors contained “helper” T cells, known as CD4+, and 70 percent contained killer T cells, known as CD8+, which directly kill the viral cells. Then they discovered “SARS-CoV-2−reactive CD4+ T cells in ∼40-60% of unexposed individuals, suggesting cross-reactive T cell recognition between circulating ‘common cold’ coronaviruses and SARS-CoV-2.”

    The hypothesis is that numerous common colds are forms of coronavirus and that a significant percentage of the population that has already contracted those forms of coronavirus have cross-immunity to COVID-19. It’s unclear to what degree these people are immune, but it might help explain why some people in certain areas react so violently to COVID-19, whereas so many others are asymptomatic. In other words, it’s possible that people with cross-immunity could still catch the virus, but their reaction to it will either never present symptoms or present very mildly due to the pre-existing T cells working for them.

    The authors note that more time and cell numbers are needed to study identification of the cross-reactive chains of cells.

    A similar T cell study published April 22 by German immunologist Andreas Thiel found that 34% of 68 blood samples from people not infected with SARS-CoV-2 hosted helper T cells that nevertheless recognized the novel coronavirus.

    The authors of the newer study posit that the concept of “crossreactive memory T cell responses might have been one factor contributing to the lesser severity of the H1N1 flu pandemic.” There is still no way of proving whether those T cells discovered in non-infected individuals are definitively effective in warding off the virus or blunting its symptoms, but the theory might explain some enigmatic behaviors of this virus.

    On the one hand, this virus seems to be extremely contagious and transmissible. On the other hand, it appears to have been around for a while, possibly in December, and didn’t kill too many people until super-spreading events in March.

    On the one hand, the virus seems to kill a lot of vulnerable people for several weeks. But then it peaks after six weeks or so and nearly disappears a month or so later. We’ve seen the same curve in every country, almost as if it hits a brick wall and then runs out of steam.

    But why is that the case? Most antibody tests show no more than 10%-15% of the population contain antibodies in a given area – 25% in the most extreme case of New York City. Why would the virus not continue cutting through the population like butter, as it did the first number of people who contracted the virus? The theory of a more ubiquitous cross-immunity from other coronaviruses would answer those questions and explain that invisible brick wall.

    A theory of partial immunity, at least from helper T cells (if not killer T cells) could also explain why, on the one hand, once the virus gets into prisons, most test positive for it, but on the other hand, nearly all of them seem asymptomatic. The outcome of prisons as a fully confined and defined population could be a harbinger of what would theoretically happen if the entire world were exposed to the virus after it had already targeted the most vulnerable population. It’s possible that upwards of 95% would be asymptomatic, just like we are seeing in prisons.

    Perhaps, it could also explain why there appears to be a massive gap in severity of the virus in Asia vs. Western countries. Asian countries are regularly exposed to coronaviruses.

    Professor Karol Sikora, founder of University of Buckingham Medical Schools, has a short video explaining in layman’s terms the significance of this T cell study and cross-immunity.

      The virus is being tamed more successfully than many thought possible. How?

      We have more cellular immunity (T cells) than estimated.

      Lots of recovered people simply don’t have antibodies, but also many have residual immunity from old viruses (colds etc).

      This is significant. pic.twitter.com/AaanJCDeX7

      — Professor Karol Sikora (@ProfKarolSikora) May 22, 2020

    Sunetra Gupta, professor of theoretical epidemiology at the University of Oxford, is also a strong believer in the likelihood of cross-immunity. “We may also be able to fend off the virus with pre-existing responses against other coronaviruses, which I think is very likely to play a role in protection, specifically against severity of the disease,” said Professor Gupta in a recent interview with a British media outlet.

    “In almost every context we’ve seen the epidemic grow, turn around and die away — almost like clockwork. Different countries have had different lockdown policies, and yet what we’ve observed is almost a uniform pattern of behavior which is highly consistent with the SIR model. To me that suggests that much of the driving force here was due to the build-up of immunity.”

    Stanford professor of epidemiology John P.A. Ioannidis has also posited the existence of cross-immunity and the idea that many people’s bodies are using innate cellular immunity to ward off the virus.

    This theory might also explain why Sweden believes it reached herd immunity with just 20 percent infected and why some studies suggest a similar ratio could be achieved elsewhere.

    To be clear, these are all unproven theories at this point. But if our government and media were willing to run with unproven theories of doom and gloom even as the facts on the ground refuted them, shouldn’t they at least examine some good news when the fact pattern of the virus itself seems to harmonize with the theory?

    Why are American politicians immune to good news as if it were the plague?
#15094879
@Sivad Yeah, I agree, it’s hard to see how the Wuhan virus is responsible for the death of a man shot in the head thirty-three times. It does kinda make you wonder how many other similar (if not as extreme) cases there are. And there’s an obvious reason why some states, at least, might want to inflate their numbers—those in power don’t want voters asking, “we shut down our economy for this?”
#15094982
Pants-of-dog wrote:We seem to be doing all right with the Trump virus. My biggest concern is that we share a border with the most infected country in the world.

Maybe your government should have built a wall. :lol:
#15094997
Doug64 wrote:One question that the overall numbers don't answer is how many of those excess deaths are due to the Wuhan virus, and how many are due to people not having access to medical services or are afraid to access them.

You are right that direct attribution is not possible. It's more of an indicator of the effects of the pandemic as a whole, although one can tease out additional information, as has been done for the UK (e.g. see my post here if you are interested).

Doug64 wrote:The numbers I've seen from admittedly not-exactly-rigorous-or-universal studies in the US ran from 50% asymptomatic to as high as 98%. Of course the latter was in a prison where the population would be (very) disproportionately younger and healthier, which is where the less-than-univseral part comes in....

Some of the discrepancy could be down to the type of test used. PCR tests will catch people who have just been infected and might be pre-symptomatic whereas antibody tests will catch them some time into their illness when they are more likely to be really asymptomatic.

That said, I've read about the result from antibody tests in the UK today which had a higher percentage of asymptomatic people, so who knows?

Edit: National Review has this on the CDC data:
NR wrote:[...]

I don’t have a scorching hot take on the number. But I do want to know where it comes from, which is not clear from the site itself. It says the information is based on data about a month old and names the source “Preliminary COVID-19 estimates, CDC,” which I have not been able to locate (if indeed it refers to a specific document at all).

I have contacted the CDC several times in the past week to no avail. Both the Center for Public Integrity and BuzzFeed similarly report that they sought comment and received no reply.

If the fatality rate of this thing is 0.26 percent, that is fantastic news. If the CDC has evidence this is the case, it should share it with the rest of us.
#15098716
Ran out of time to get to this over the weekend, but here's where we stood as of Saturday night:

Image

And in the middle of the rioting, looting, and arson that swept the nation, here's something people might have missed:

Michigan barber wins reopen case at state Supreme Court

    The Michigan state supreme court sided with a 77-year-old barber Friday night, ruling his shop could open despite prolonged shutdowns of wide swaths of the economy ordered by Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitner.

    In a unanimous ruling, the court overturned the decision of an appeals court that upheld a temporary restraining order the Whitmer administration had sought in what became a spotlighted case in an ongoing dispute in Michigan.

    The decision also makes moot a motion by the state attorney general to hold Karl Manke, the barber, in contempt and be fined $5,000 a day for cutting hair while observing social distancing rules, according to Mr. Manke’s attorney.

    “It is incumbent on the courts to ensure decisions are made according to the rule of law, not hysteria,” state justice David Viviano wrote in a concurring opinion. “One hopes that this great principle - essential to any free society, including ours - will not itself become yet another casualty of COVID-19.”

    Mr. Manke’s decision to fight the shutdown rather than face what he said was near-certain economic ruin became something of a cause celebre among opponents of Ms. Whitmer’s strict stay-at-home rules. Her repeated extensions of the shutdown, currently scheduled to be lifted on June 12, also prompted an unsuccessful lawsuit from the Republican legislative majority and a major protest in Lansing last week dubbed ‘Operation Haircut.’

    Since then, however, the symbolism of Mr. Manke’s fight has also become a subject of some mockery in addition to admiration. In recent days, some proponents of the massive demonstrations following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody have argued those violations of COVID-19 shelter in place rules are justified as of greater significance than “getting a haircut.”

    Nevertheless, Mr. Manke, who reopened his shop on May 4 after Ms. Whitmer’s first shutdown extension, issued a statement saying he was grateful for the opportunity to once again pursue a livelihood.

    “I needed to work and figured it was time to move forward,” he said. “But I feel like I have been ruled over with a heavy hand, not governed, and my constitutional rights have been trampled underfoot. It is high time for all of Michigan to stand up, open up for business, and for people in the our community to show up in support.”

    David Kallman, Mr. Manke’s attorney, had appealed to the Supreme Court on the grounds the appeals court 2-1 overruling of the district judge was in violation of a Michigan law requiring such commands to be made only by unanimous panels and in extraordinary circumstances.

    “I am gratified that the Supreme Court was not swayed by speculation and hyperbole,” Mr. Kallman said. “I applaud the court for its continued commitment to adhere to the rule of law. This is a great day in Michigan for the protection of everyone’s constitutional rights.”
#15100030
Another week, and this time the US as a whole has moved up the ranks a bit:

Image

And a series of Tweets by @AlexBerenson on why any attempt to foster another Wuhan virus panic will probably fail:

    1/ This panic is likely to prove even more embarrassing than previous panics. Here's why: the media is both confused and conflating several different data points in an effort to stir hysteria. (Stop me if you've heard this before.)

    What do I mean?

    2/ So: you've heard positive tests are up in several states. True. The media refers to these as "cases," as if positive tests have clinical significance by themselves. They do not. The vast majority of people with positive tests do not become ill enough to need hospitalization...

    3/ Much less intensive care or ventilator support. For people under 50, this is true in the extreme. But the daily age distribution of positive tests is rarely if ever supported...

    4/ Second: you've heard overall hospitalizations are up in some states. This is also true. THIS IS A FEATURE, NOT A BUG. Overall hospitalizations are rising because people are returning to hospitals for elective (and in some cases very necessary) surgeries that were postponed...

    5/ Now, in some of these states COVID-related hospitalizations have also risen (though they make up a tiny fraction of overall hospitalizations). Scary, right?

    No. When people go to the hospital for elective surgeries they are now routinely tested for COVID...

    6/ Whether or not they are symptomatic. Hospitals have financial and legal as well as medical incentives to do this. IF THEY ARE POSITIVE, hospitals will report them as COVID patients (since, technically, they are), EVEN IF THEY HAVE NO COVID SYMPTOMS.

    7/ This fact accounts for the bizarre disconnect between the fact the number of people going to emergency rooms with influenza-like or COVID-like symptoms is NOT rising (and remains in the low single digits) even in states reporting more hospitalizations...

    8/ As well as the fact that fewer hospitalized cases are now progressing to ventilators (I can't swear to this in every state, but it appears to be a trend)...

    9/ And the fact that deaths no longer seem to have any relationship to case counts in many states (true even accounting for the fact that deaths lag).

    The question you should be asking yourself: why aren't Europe and Asia seeing post-lockdown spikes if this trend is real?

    10/ And don't say masks. Masks are not routine in Europe. So either COVID is somehow different post-lockdown in Europe (and different in different states, too)... or this is just one last gasp of panic porn.
#15100124
Doug64 wrote:how are we doing?

Malta

9 dead/493,550 alive (not all of them well)
#15100133
ingliz wrote:Malta

9 dead/493,550 alive (not all of them well)

18.6 per million, ranked 77/87, not bad at all. Mind, I suspect being a tiny island helps....
#15100185
Pants-of-dog wrote:We have had a strong resurgence of the Trump virus here once things opened up again.

But we are still doing way better than the perfect storm of infection to our south.

Where is "here" and which "perfect storm of infection" to the south are you talking about?
#15100190
Doug64 wrote:Where is "here" and which "perfect storm of infection" to the south are you talking about?


What do you mean?

Anyway, one of the reasons we are doing better than developing countries is because we have public healthcare. The death toll from the Trump virus would be much worse if we had no public healthcare or paid sick leave, which is thankfully not the case in any developed country.
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