COVID-19 antibody test studies are showing that about 14% have already had the disease in New York and about 5% in California.
New York City and Long Island have about 20% infection rates.
About 2.7 million people in the state of New York had the disease at some point and their bodies developed antibodies.
SOURCES- CNBC
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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I am keenly aware of that. It concerns me more than you, since I am 72 and suffer from managed rheumatoid arthritis and I am bloodgroup A. So if or when it comes to me, I know my chances. I died once before, towards the end I just felt tired but all the pain was gone.
Based on the Antibody tests they did in NYC the mortality rate would be around what you said. Still yet 0.5% to 0.8% mortality rate would still be over a million deaths. And most of these people will be seniors who have a much higher mortality rate. I would estimate between 5% and 8%.
Hmm, no, that sounds like almost the opposite of what R.Kimhi was suggesting.
But yes, it should have a good chance of working, though 2 weeks sounds a bit light.
Ah – from your source, looks like they actually took a full month of lockdown, not 2 weeks.
That’s what New Zealand did, they locked down nearly all businesses and institutions other than medical, food, and gasoline. They quarantined everyone coming in from abroad, then later shut down all travel in and out, and then shutdown all internal travel. They kept it that way two weeks and seem to have beat the virus, so they opened up travel out of the country.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/travel/2020/04/what-new-zealand-did-right-in-battling-coronavirus/
There are also indications those who had the virus don’t get immunity to it. It could be due to false negatives but the virus has so many suspected weird (to me) characteristics it’s too soon to say either way.
https://www.wired.com/story/sorry-immunity-to-covid-19-wont-be-like-a-superpower/
You are attempting to dodge the point – this disease is worse than a ‘bad flu season’ and only held in check by measures NY was slow to implement.
Your attempt to divert attention from that with faux concern for NY is pointless – they’ve already implemented social distancing and got their rate of case growth under control.
other states aren’t as bad as NY. So how about extra effort be spent on NY instead of making a broad assumption that it will be as bad.
He frequently stresses the importance and contribution of co-morbidity. Heart, lung, diabetes etc. In the end we all die from the same cause, the heart stops.
In a few more days we’ll exceed the ~60,000 deaths of the worst US flu season of the past decade.
If we accept that NY – with 20,000 deaths – is at 15% infected/recovered, then if the whole US had done as badly as NY at controlling COVID19, we would now have 325,000 deaths.
Campbell is saying the majority of people are dying from COVID19 and not with it. This is BS. It’s the opposite.
Don’t you mean “…with a wheeze”.
Same thing could have happened with the flu any of the hundred plus years since the Spanish Flu, or any of the times Ebola popped up.
Though, babies do loose IQ points if their mother had the flu while pregnant: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/health/swine-flu/5909239/Flu-in-pregnancy-could-lower-childs-IQ.html
Not Zika bad, but certainly to be avoided.
And since this coronavirus does attack brains, there is a good chance the damage could be more severe than the flu. Pregnancy is a very vulnerable time.
If pregnant, studies show best for IQ is to: Eat fish often, tuna (not Albacore), salmon, sardines, 8 servings of a variety of fruit a day, foods with folate, supplement with at least 2 grams of Choline a day. Get enough iodine, and avoid: lead, cadmium, mercury, arsenic, fluoride, furniture with polybrominated diphenyl ethers’ (PBDE), alcohol, tobacco, and other recreational drugs. And you want it quiet when sleeping. If you live in a home made before 1978 (in the US) then do not do any remodeling while the mother is living in the house. Too much risk of lead exposure from paint dust. Avoid Balsamic vinegar. Might be best to avoid chocolate if you are uncertain if it has lead in it or not. Avoid yams, sweet potatoes, and carrots (root veggies often have lead).
Adapting quickly to a sufficiently dangerous situation by slamming on severe restrictions may be smart, especially in the face of lack of information.
But failing to CONTINUE to adapt quickly as you get new information is the height of STUPID. For example:
https://www.newsweek.com/most-us-hospitals-are-empty-soon-they-might-closed-good-opinion-1500028
Lots of evidence of asymptomatic spread. You need to test people are random or contact trace heavily. SARS could be contained because people were only contagious only when very ill.
Right. The idiot assumes he knows, when he clearly doesn’t.
To get 2.3m killed, it would take like 100% population infected. That would be literally impossible to ever get that many infected because eventually you’d hit herd immunity probably at 30-40%.
We have no idea what China is or isn’t doing or how many dead they’ve got. There is no entity that would keep their totalitarian police state honest.
I follow a retired English doctor “John Campbell” who makes a daily U tube on the state of Covid around the world. He is very objective. With the figures and stats for different countries. comparing the numbers of the people with the antibody and comparing them to the deaths he arrives at a mortality rate of 0.5 to 0.8%.
I suppose it depends on what you mean by ‘algorithmically’, but when I’ve taken reported total cases minus active cases minus deaths on a state-by-state level, the sum of resulting ‘recovered cases’ numbers is generally pretty close to the total ‘recovered’ reported on Worldometers site.
Do you have some other way to determine recovered cases?
I believe about 17 states are not updating their active case count to remove recoveries, for whatever reason. So if you like, increase the daily ‘recovered’ count by a factor of 50/33 to roughly approximate ‘real’ daily recoveries.
That plus daily deaths STILL falls far short of new cases.
You can’t just rely on reported for recovered because they basically aren’t doing it in many places in the USA. If you do that then zero have recovered in Florida which is absurd. So you have to do it yourself algorithmically. https://www.clickorlando.com/news/local/2020/04/08/interactive-map-shows-coronavirus-recovery-numbers-worldwide/?outputType=amp
Never assume, know.
Pathetic.
You are right in that people who we out and about may have a much higher probability of been infected with the virus.
Could already be the end of the world. The virus love fest isn’t over. The virus may only be a mutation or two away from killing us all. Immunity to the virus does not last. It continues to kill. Whittling our numbers down bit by bit. Nine months from now we could find out that all infected people are sterile or the babies they have are all Zika babies.
This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang, but with a whimper.
I feel the percentage are a bit high but I do hope they are right because if they are right then the death rate for the virus is a lot lower than what we originally thought it was. Also we would be a lot nearer to herd immunity where the transmission of the virus falls to low levels.
We need cheap FDA approved test available for online purchase so people can verify whether or not they were infected. If would ease some people minds.
Funny, when I quoted these models in expressing my opinion that the political responses were OVERBLOWN and destroying our economy, some on here said I was being conspiratorial. Yep, Stanford, USC and State of NY are all in on it apparently. This will end up being a bad flu season, nothing more. To be sure, a bad flu season includes a lot of deaths, which nobody wants, but the response should be to hot spots and those at risk, not one-size-fits-all responses to worst case scenario models that were wrong before they were published.
Ugh. I hate to say it, but the charts at that NY Times site appear almost contrived to make it look like everything’s going great.
E.g. they show % new deaths/new cases as a fraction of total – which of course falls rapidly even if you’re getting a constant number or slowly rising number of new deaths or new cases each day.
And they show confirmed cases and deaths on a log-scale chart that makes it look like things are leveling off instead of continuing to increase near-linearly or increasing slowly.
Their ‘new cases per 1000’ and ‘new deaths per 1000’ charts are a bit more honest, so long as you understand that leveling off as they do means a more or less constant increase in new cases/deaths. It’d be awfully easy for a math-illiterate to think those charts mean cases and deaths have leveled off.
It’s not rocket science, a large majority need to do the things needed to inhibit the opportunities for transmission, likely it’s not you that would fail to do that, it’ll be the people that would, given the opportunity, go to crowded nightclubs and parties, not wear masks when in crowded supermarkets.
Nice link, thanks.
When you say “Case numbers in the USA only very recently started increasing at the same rate people are getting over it” I suspect you meant recoveries and deaths are finally matching new cases?
But that doesn’t seem to be true.
Over 4 days – April 19 up to yesterday Apr 23 (per Worldometers site) US new recoveries have been about 15K, new deaths about 10K, but confirmed new cases have been over 120K. We’re nowhere near peak active cases, based on that.
What sacrifices do we need to make to win this war? Do I need to buy war bonds? Maybe we should keep all the truckers home?
South Korea had among the best testing early on, but they are way down the list in tests per 1 million people now: 11,499. The US is at 14,823…and NY is much higher at 37,243. Iceland is at the top with 132,709 tested per 1 million.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
Yes. I was not contesting that. The NY figures show 59.7% of deaths are male, 40.2% female. 0.1% unknown. It is a question of why. If that answer is just that they are exposed more, because macho bozos are out there ignoring orders, or they are protecting their wives/girlfriends by going and getting what is needed, then it really is not meaningful. If it is something to do with male physiology, then it would be of more concern and perhaps the lady should go get the groceries.
Also, I was thinking the higher smoking rates among men might have been the reason. That thinking is now in question…or maybe just part of the reason.
57% vs 43% in this test. So that accounts for all but 3% of the difference. 12.8% of women smoke in NY and 15.0% of men smoke in NY. So 2.2% difference.
Probably more like 400,000 based on Los Angeles tests.
I’m guessing 800,000 is if you let the hospitals get fully overwhelmed like NYC (and they stay that way all through to herd immunity).
Now we might find 50% of those 400,000 extra would have likely died in 4-6 years on average anyways, but we really just don’t have that data yet (and might never). In that case this was SO not worth it according to the dismal math. The economic damage long term will kill much more than we saved in life-years in that scenario.
And we also might find treatments shortly that cut the fatality rate in say half, so flattening the curve will be immensely rewarded. There’s a lot of uncertainty still.
These preliminary serological tests are suggesting that only like 10% of Covid-19 cases were even caught by testing and/or diagnosis. So you’re off by that factor. More like 0.4% death rate, likely less in areas that didn’t have overwhelmed hospitals like NYC. Los Angeles is like half of NYCs death rate if you accept their serological test numbers.
It’s almost certain to be 6 to 18 months – but yeah, it may go away after that. We don’t know yet.
That’s not exactly accurate. You CAN make a vaccine for the cold but it is no more effective than the antibodies you’ll already have from getting a closely related strain in the past, so there isn’t much point. So in the case of a novel virus like this one a vaccine is potentially useful. However if we’re at 20% in NYC (and keep in mind the 6-20 day lagging indicator of serological tests, so NYC could easily be 40% actual now) it is questionable it will be available in time before most everybody has already been infected.
More men DO die from it…
Most got it just before and during the social distancing yes (during social distancing many infections are going to be between roommates and family members). Very obvious if you look at the case number growth graphs. Case numbers in the USA only very recently started increasing at the same rate people are getting over it, with around 14 days of symptoms average.
Look at some daily growth rate as a % samples. An 18%-19% growth rate over 20 days is a 32x multiplication of cases.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/03/upshot/coronavirus-metro-area-tracker.html#daily-growth-rate
It is hard to say what fraction would get infected, if they never did a thing. With a cold, there is always a substantial fraction that already had this before. So while people may be exposed they would not catch it and give it to others. Who has never had a cold and/or never had the flu? If people have it all around you, seems pretty likely you will get it.
Sure, herd immunity. But at what level? Could be over 80%.
Thank God everyone who tests positive is not in the hospital. However, I said “1%, or more”. I did not put a limit on that. Though I am willing to say it is almost certainly below 6%. My guess is 1.5% +/- .3%. Though all that can go down if we find an effective treatment. I am very disappointed that remdesivir did not have a good result, though more results will be coming. hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine are looking bad. These seem to just lead to more death.
We are not out of possibilities and forced to wait for something specific to be developed. There are still possibilities. Auranofin looks interesting. EIDD-2801 looks interesting. And anticoagulants, Gout, and asthma medications. And we need to use more blood/plasma transfusions from recovered patients. ECMO machines need to be used more and sooner, and liquid breathing stuff needs to be looked at.
Hospitalizations we can deal with. It is the deaths, and possibly injuries from this that are the real issue. And I think we should be trying zinc and iodine, maybe other minerals/vitamins. If these help, they would be very cheap compared to some new drug, and there is virtually no downside…and could be used by the public as a preventative. I also think we should be genotyping intensive care patients. If they are more likely to have some particular alleles, that opens a lot of possibilities. Like testing to see who is likely to get a bad infection, and isolating them before they get it. Others back to work.
That just reflects the small fraction of people with the virus that are actually being diagnosed in many countries. The recent NY study is basically sound, though not without fault, the majority of cases in NY are not being diagnosed, the results of the antibody study suggest 7 in 8, personally, based on countries like New Zealand, Australia, Taiwan and Iceland I think it’s about 3 in 4 people in NY not being diagnosed. in those 4 countries we see much lower fatality rates of around 1% and much lower hospitalization rates, around 2-3%. Why those countries are the gold standard is because they’ve tested so thoroughly that they’ve gotten their positive test rates down to about 1% (Australia, NZ, Taiwan) and 4% (Iceland). That low positive test rate is a product of testing almost everyone in contact with cases and testing everyone with symptoms.
In European countries (except Germany, Czechia and a few others) it’s more like 1 in 10, even 1 in 15 that are being diagnosed, the tell on that is the much higher positive test rates (especially early in their testing), they were simply unable to test most people and many people with minor symptoms were actually avoiding hospitals.
It looks like there is an inverse relationship between the % of vegetarians in a country and number of deaths. More vegetarians less deaths.
Not sure I’m following…. 6 months+ showing antibodies (according to you) so you are assuming the 14% got covid19 DURING the lockdown?
Again – not following. It seems pretty clear they were infected before the total lockdown.
I am not understanding why people fail to interpret the 14% antibody population as 1) obviously immune 2) exposed at least in majority before lockdown.
Anything to keep the ruling class from admitting that the lockdown was unnecessary… now the overly cautious docs say, ” well a large part of the population has gotten over this flu and they carry antibodies for the virus but we can’t say they are immune for sure.” As if we get same cold twice a season. they are stretching to maintain some credibility and justify their unprecedented and unnecessary lockdown, when it should be dissipating rapidly. it took so long getting joe six pack on board with the quarantine that it’s hard to reverse it. Tell Joe six-pack about antibodies and he doesn’t know… they have to come out and start saying that this germ is not more deadly than the flu which many of us realized when we got over it in February.
I am watching the masses not react to this brilliantly wonderful news that 20% of New York City has immunity because they were exposed before the lockdown… they don’t have enough brains to interpret it properly. They are Joe sixpack. the leaders need to come clean now and say they were wrong.
On global figures about 20% of Covid-19 positive cases land up in hospital. Of those who land up in hospital slightly more than 20% die. That is a overall death rate of about 4% which is huge and way above all the figures being bandied around
National unity is needed to get numbers down quickly, people willing to make the sacrifices to win the war, the US doesn’t have that at the moment.
The absolute number of new confirmed cases in the US seems to have roughly leveled off, but is NOT declining. And it appears to be happening on a state-by-state basis, NOT just averaged across the US.
If that continues to be the case, it will likely take another month before recoveries and deaths match the new confirmed cases and we actually see the peak of active cases.
But if constant new confirmed cases continues, the curve of active confirmed cases may simply plateau, not start downward.
With New York confirmed cases at around 1.4% and total cases at around 14%, and if they need about 60%-70% total cases for herd immunity to get the new infection rate below 1 for 1, they may be looking at 2 months before active cases start to decline much, and 3-4 before herd immunity is able to really get active cases down. If New York finishes up at ~80% actual cases, they’d have about 8% confirmed cases, and around 80K deaths there.
With the US as a whole running about 10% of New York’s per capita cases, if flattening the curve only plateaus the active cases (confirmed and actual), we’d be looking at a much longer period with no apparent improvement in deaths or hospital cases.
There are several countries I look at, including South Korea, because they’ve done a great job at track and trace, South Korea though I think on the high side because they were off to a slow start, I think they would have missed a few mild and asymptomatic cases early, Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan and Iceland are my go-to with SK good, but not as good.
I think you are nearest what could turn out but your mortality figures are too low. Please see my comment on Andrew’s below
Spot on. The great people of the US should hold trials for those responsible
Only a minority of those not recovered or dead are in hospitals, only about 5% of symptomatic cases require hospitalization, most recover at home.
From the results across several countries we can be certain that fatality rates are below 5% likely below 2% (when we include the ~50% of asymptomatic cases).
As I write this NY has 268,581 total cases, 20,861 deaths and 218,127 in hospitals. What is the outcome of those in hospitals going to be?
By subtraction 29,593 I assume have recovered. Pretty close 40% deaths to 60% recovered where there is an outcome
What is the outcome of the 218,127 still in hospital?
If our immune system is ineffective against upper respiratory infections, why does anyone ever recover from them?
I presume by “the sick” you mean people with severe symptoms, because if you meant “everyone infected”, you would get no spread and no herd immunity – though if you COULD do that, you would have a chance of getting the virus to die out. Probably can’t though, as symptoms start after infectiousness.
But if you do mean those with severe symptoms, what is the point of isolating them, since you’re letting the virus spread freely anyhow?
Hey it makes sense. It stopped Saudi Arabia from attacking Yemen, when nothing else could. And the head of the U.N. thinks the world could trade fighting the common enemy virus instead of each other too.
All I am saying (to music) is Give Virus a Chance….
The NY results mean that if the diseases keeps spreading until herd immunity is reached and that that happens at 67% of the population infected, across the US that would be 800,000 deaths.
Of course the California figure you use is complete BS, death rates (per million) in Cal are at just 3.5% of those in NY, the NY figure of 14% might be high by 1% due to false positives, so actually about 13%, the Cal figure is high due to both false positives and selection bias rather than being 5% is actually about 0.5% or less.
Having said that the NY figures are also not truly based on random sampling: Those that were tested were people that were out and about and came across the testing station, if not all people get out and about in urban areas to the same extent that is many live rural or just stay home more the chances of them being tested are lower, and so are the chances of them being infected.
Serological tests show antibodies after around 6-20 days after getting over infection and then for 6 months+
And most people that are going to die do it around day 14. So your statement just isn’t true.
No one knows yet. Which makes it more important to adopt policies that do not make us vulnerable to the more deadly pandemics that lurk behind panic porn and totalitarian shutdowns.
Deadly shutdowns are making it worse. Let’s use smart social distancing instead so that most of us will live through this thing with an actual economy.
The real scam is the totalitarian voodoo shutdowns they pretend are necessary.
They want it to be the end of the world with all the panic porn.
Maybe even higher. The South Korean numbers should be quite accurate, because they have done testing on a massive scale. And their fatality rate is 2%.
The tens of thousands of deaths on New York are quite real.
And how do you know that we will gain herd immunity if enough people gets sick ?. I still haven’t seen a study confirming any immunity, and much less how long it would last once recovered : for ever ?, a couple of years ?, a couple of months ?, …
Been saying this for over a month. This is a hoax, a scam, fraud, whatever you want to call it.
Just wait till they do antibody tests in places like India and China. The actual numbers will go up into the high hundreds of millions.
A lot of discussion about Covid-19 assumes there is a way to achieve immunity via a vaccine or by getting the disease and recovering from it.
I saw an article written by a vaccine researcher who said that we have never been able to create a vaccine against an upper respiratory disease, and since Covid-19 is an upper respiratory disease, we should not expect to develop a vaccine for it, either.
The article explained that, due to the way our immune system works, it is ineffective against attacks on the mucous membranes.
Although the article did not address immunity attained by recovering from the disease, it seems to me that would not be achievable, either, if the claim is true about our immune system being ineffective against attacks on our mucous membranes. If so, all appeals to herd immunity are fantasy.
We don’t acquire immunity to the common cold by recovering from it. Is there any upper respiratory disease that we become immune to after recovering from it?
This is not my area of experience, but it seems like getting immunity to Covid-19 is not possible, so we better figure out a different way to live with it, long term.
Yeah, the whole reason it may not kill 2.3 million people is because social distancing. And our society is stronger than you thing, we can have scandals and still protect ourselves from a disease. BTW the reason China isn’t in this slog right now is because they took drastic measures, they didn’t beat it with American exceptionalism. And it is more than the cold, 50k people dead and it is just warming up in the US. Even the White House thinks the deaths are much higher since they don’t count cases complicated with coronavirus.
It looks like the right recipe for fighting a plague like the covid 19 is quickly and properly quarantining the sick at the infectious stage which is the highest just around the time the symptoms appear while keeping the social space mostly open so herd immunity can spread and isolating only individuals that are older and at higher health risk. Social distancing, crowd avoidance and mask wearing are useful here But not closing the public space and the economy. Seems like Sweden and Japan got really close to this. S. Korea and Taiwan were able to stop the epidemic at a very early stage so there was no need for herd immunity to develop. In a more mathematical manner what is needed is to optimize the drip drip of the virus into the population at a rate that minimizes the ratio of infections and deaths to that of herd immunity cases rather than trying to stop it completely.
Which makes it about 3x deadlier than the common flu without compensating for the deaths tagged as CV19 that shouldn’t have been. (2017-2018 season, 60k deaths, 45M infections)
This is still a substantial underestimation. Like he said, these are people who were “out and about”. I think you are more likely to be out and about, if you have convinced yourself, or know, you already had it, and got over it. Also, people out and about, probably have been out more than others, so were more likely to have contracted the infection.
And, of course, as he also said, they did not count anyone who did not die in the hospital or a nursing home.
I think we are looking at 1% death or more if it was allowed to run amuck. 1% would be 3.3 million.
And we still have the self-selection problem. If I set up a free test area in front of the grocery, people are more likely to do the test if they think they might have had it.
One interesting fact was that more men were infected. That might undermine the “men are more vulnerable to the virus” idea. If more men catch it, you would expect more men to die from it.
That’s assuming 100% of the population gets infected, which doesn’t tend to happen.
Keep trying, but the hysteria is wearing off… Funny how things change in a day.
Phew, and not a day too soon. We have maintained this hysteria for about 40 days!
ALL THOSE PEOPLE (the 4% in Cali and 14% in NYC) GOT OVER THE COLD WHILE CHINA WAS SPRAYING DOWN THEIR WUHAN WITH SYMBOLIC TRUCK-BORN ANTISEPTIC FOGGERS IN DECEMBER, JANUARY AND FEBRUARY…. IOW, while we were following ‘the impeachment’.
From that data, if let run its course it would kill 1.3 million Americans. To put that in context that’s almost as much as the total deaths from all wars we ever fought in.