4th Study Shows COVID-19 Cases Massively Underestimated

_{Barry Arrington
April 23, 2020

Intelligent Design

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Intelligent Design}

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This account of the report states:

Preliminary results from New York’s first coronavirus antibody study show nearly 14 percent tested positive, meaning they had the virus at some point and recovered, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Thursday. That equates to 2.7 million infections statewide — more than 10 times the state’s confirmed cases.

Cue the science deniers: Jim Thibodeau and Orthomyxo, you’re up. How are you going to dismiss this latest study in furtherance of your calls for hysteria and panic at the expense of dispassionate reason?

Comments

The CDC seems to be hiding their confirmed flu case data for some reason. I remember looking at the weekly figures on March 21 and they had reported 242,330 confirmed flu cases for the season with approximately 24,000 deaths. I wrote it down. This gives you a confirmed death rate at the time of about 10%. Now, I can no longer find the total numbers on their site.FourFaces_{April 23, 2020
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TF
Talk about the unborn being expendable is unethical and immoral, however and should not be allowed to pass unchallenged.
I don’t know. My daughter had a chemically induced termination yesterday and I am very thankful that she did. Does that make me immoral.?Ed George_{April 23, 2020
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A recommendation to open the country
New antibody tests for SARS-CoV-2 are providing better estimates of the mortality rate of COVID-19. Prior to serology testing, the prevalence of novel-coronavirus infection was calculated to be only 0.26% in the US with a mortality rate of 5.60%. Serology tests, however, now show the infection prevalence to be far higher with a calculated mortality rate of about 0.18%. With age-selective quarantining in combination with widespread testing, telemedicine consultations and early treatment with hydroxychloroquine, azithromycin and zinc, the mortality rate could be reduced to 0.03%. By instituting these measures, the projected number of deaths moving forward could be fewer than the number of deaths in the flu season of 2017-2018.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vT4I4Ls6RAsDqSaKBVIdLPIKFNs7tbWWzZ3eP1NrNltiiZqmUHK-rPDLxeN2qvt0es1S-v6jP29S_T1/pub Guaranteed to get one side of the political spectrum even more deranged. They will try to ensure this or anything close to it never sees the light of day. Will they all end up in TDS or in Total Deranged Syndrome.jerry_{April 23, 2020
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21% in New York City could be a legitimate number. That’s way outside of the false positive rates on typical lab tests, whereas the earlier 2 to 4% numbers were not. Some standard lab tests can throw false positives higher than that.Jim Thibodeau_{April 23, 2020
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Oh, that's not a death rate by flu. that's a survelience stat that the CDC uses to track flu. Because so few tests are done for flu, it would not be possible to track it from tests/death certificates alone. Instead, they keep track of the poportion of deaths occurring from pneumonia (including fungal and bacterial) and those with flu in the death certificate, if you see an uptick you looking at an epidemic of flu (with many deaths being recorded as pneumonia). The very high number at the moment is more evidence for the impact of covid-19, where lots of deaths are being coded as pneumonia (less than 5% of the most recent weeks data are flu, and it's not clear if any of those are accompanied by a test). I don't know enough about teh CDC stats gathering to know if that's also evidence for undercounting covid-19 deaths (they might be both pneumonia and covid-19), but it's clear from that graph how much worse than a seasonal flu season this is.orthomyxo_{April 23, 2020
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I can't find the CDC numbers for the current season for some reason but I found the confirmed flu death rate for last week and it's high (11.9%) compared to the normal epidemic threshold of 7.0%. "According to the CDC, Based on National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) mortality surveillance data available on April 16, 2020, 11.9% of the deaths occurring during the week ending April 11, 2020 (week 15) were due to P&I. This percentage is above the epidemic threshold of 7.0% for week 15." https://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/#S2FourFaces_{April 23, 2020
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I would like to see the study with the confirmed IFR for the flu, but so few are tested for that virus it's not a useful stat. Any claim that death tolls in NYC are inflated needs to explain the huge spike in mortality in the city this month https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/21/world/coronavirus-missing-deaths.htmlorthomyxo_{April 23, 2020
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Seversky
Talk about the elderly or the chronically ill being expendable is unethical and immoral, however and should not be allowed to pass unchallenged.
We do agree. Can we agree too to the following?
Talk about the unborn being expendable is unethical and immoral, however and should not be allowed to pass unchallenged.
Truthfreedom_{April 23, 2020
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Orthomyxo @12 IMO, the estimated IFR for COVID-19 is no higher than the seasonal flu. The CDC and other parties went out of their way to inflate the number of COVID deaths. The huge discrepancy between the California and NY estimated IFR is a clue that something fishy is going on. Moreover, the confirmed fatality rate for flu is 10% so far for this season compared to about 4 or 5% for COVID-19.FourFaces_{April 23, 2020
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Barry, I don't know if you are paying attention, but there are already an order of magnitude more deaths in the US the you were almost certain would represent an upper bound a month ago. Meanwhile,I said the true IFR might be 0.66% on this comment at the start of April https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/pass-me-a-corona-ii/#comment-697228. Today we have this study suggesting 0.5%, hardly a huge correction.orthomyxo_{April 23, 2020
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Four faces, The IFR I mentioned above is the infection fatality rate (probability of dying if infected) and a crude one reported in the news story is 0.5%. likely a bit low because of undercount of deaths and the long time from infection to death for some cases. That's 5x the oft quoted (high) estimate for a flu. Also, thanks to vaccines, existing immunity and low reproductive rate only a small proportion of high risk people get the flu in any season. In an uncontrolled covid 19 epidemic you might well have 80% of people infected (66% gets you to herd immunity, but people infected when they threshold is passed still transmit the disease, just to fewer than one person on average). So at this IFR you would expect more than million deaths in the US without interventions (and not considering flow on effects to hospital care)orthomyxo_{April 23, 2020
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I knew I could count on Orthomyxo to respond to his cue.
I’m not sure when I’ve called for hysteria or panic (or in fact any action at all), all I’ve tried to do is make the scale of this threat clear.
The answer to your comment lies in your comment. You have been trying to convince everyone the scale of the threat is several orders of magnitude greater than it is, which is equivalent to inciting hysteria and panic. At least you did not respond with "data is not data because I say so" like you did last time.Barry Arrington_{April 23, 2020
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In other words, there was no need for a lockdown and the destruction of the economy and millions of livelihoods. They could have simply isolated the at-risk population and treated them with prophylactic drugs. The globalists lost Russia gate, the impeachment hoax and the increasingly irrelevant climate change scam. But they seem to have won the plandemic. It's evil.FourFaces_{April 23, 2020
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I don't see them calling for panic and hysteria but COVID-19 does need to be taken a lot more seriously than just another 'flu strain. What also needs to be taken a lot more seriously also is the economic damage being caused by the mitigation measures. We need to find ways of re-opening the economy in ways which do not put other lives at risk unnecessarily. Talk about the elderly or the chronically ill being expendable is unethical and immoral, however and should not be allowed to pass unchallenged.Seversky_{April 23, 2020
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"I’m not sure when I’ve called for hysteria or panic (or in fact any action at all), all I’ve tried to do is make the scale of this threat clear." Orthomyxo, Why do you feel this is your responsibility and why do you think your opinion about it is superior to anyone else's? Andrewasauber_{April 23, 2020
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You can't assess a study, or even a bunch of them, without seeing the methodological details. I will say, the two major problems with sero surveys are false positives (when a disease is rare false positives can be more common than true positives even for a test with very high accuracy) and sample bias. A study in the worst effected place is less likely to suffer from the false positive problem, so that might be less of an issue here. Sample recruitment remains an issue, and until we know the details of that we can't assess the quality of this study. This result seems quite at odds with the California ones though. 2.7 million infections would give an. IFR of around 0.5% for the state (biased downwards due to underreporting and lag from infection to death) considerably higher than the implied IFR in the Californian studies . We'll have to wait until we get details of these studies to know which, if any, is right, but there dors seem like they can't all be. I'm not sure when I've called for hysteria or panic (or in fact any action at all), all I've tried to do is make the scale of this threat clear. Given you one thought it was almost certain fewer than 5000 Americans would die from this, I thibk that's not a bad thing.orthomyxo_{April 23, 2020
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Aaron. I did. The data is starting to become overwhelming. We've been sold a bill of goods.Barry Arrington_{April 23, 2020
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@BA Did you see my link in the “who send this” postAaronS1978_{April 23, 2020
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Ed George:
Maybe I have missed something . . .
Apparently you have. Jim Thibodeau and Orthomyxo have pushed back hard at the previous three studies with similar findings.Barry Arrington_{April 23, 2020
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We don't even need to inquire about how good or bad or conclusive or inconclusive or robust or not robust the science is. The narrative defeats everything. Andrewasauber_{April 23, 2020
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Maybe I have missed something but has anyone seriously suggested that the number of reported cases is not underestimating the true number of infections? I thought the contested issue was whether or not the number of deaths attributed to COVID was an accurate reflection of reality.Ed George_{April 23, 2020
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I expect Orthomyxo to say something like "To me that really amounts to no data," which is how he has previously dismissed data that challenge his confirmation bias.Barry Arrington_{April 23, 2020
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