COVID topic vol 2

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nomadscientist
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Re: COVID topic vol 2

Post by nomadscientist »

Large IFR reduction is possible with small vaccination fraction provided vaccination is highly targeted toward those are highest risk of death. Though I understand the US specifically has had political resistance to this, the rapid spread of the disease makes it the obviously correct policy.

IFR is more likely 0.5%, so 150k deaths per month implies ~30m infections, not all of which will be detected.

c4rat0n1a
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Re: COVID topic vol 2

Post by c4rat0n1a »

Ego wrote:
Sat Jan 02, 2021 10:24 pm
Ivermectin once again.
Plenty of national healthcare systems running large trials with it - certainly the UK and Australia are and the WHO has been funding trials in e.g. Egypt & Bangladesh since March/April.

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Ego
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Re: COVID topic vol 2

Post by Ego »

@c4rat0n1a, we were able to go from zero to vaccine in arms in such a short period of time. Yet somehow we've been unable to sufficiently trial a previously approved drug so that it could be cleared for use as a prophylactic and treatment for Covid. A drug that we knew prior to Covid had antiviral properties. A drug that is on the World Health Organization list of essential medications. A drug that had earned the Nobel Prize for the scientists who developed it. A drug that has been distributed for free by several governments in the developing world to treat Covid and appears to be successful. A drug that is extremely inexpensive, in great supply and can be made easily. A drug with relatively few side effects.

Boggles the mind.

enigmaT120
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Re: COVID topic vol 2

Post by enigmaT120 »

But a drug for which nobody knows the name.

jacob
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Re: COVID topic vol 2

Post by jacob »

https://www.pnas.org/content/118/5/e2014746118
COVID-19 has generated a huge mortality toll in the United States, with a disproportionate number of deaths occurring among the Black and Latino populations. Measures of life expectancy quantify these disparities in an easily interpretable way. We project that COVID-19 will reduce US life expectancy in 2020 by 1.13 y. Estimated reductions for the Black and Latino populations are 3 to 4 times that for Whites. Consequently, COVID-19 is expected to reverse over 10 y of progress made in closing the Black−White gap in life expectancy and reduce the previous Latino mortality advantage by over 70%. Some reduction in life expectancy may persist beyond 2020 because of continued COVID-19 mortality and long-term health, social, and economic impacts of the pandemic.
Interestingly, this is far more than the "few weeks" calculated in the crude spreadsheets I/we set up last spring (see other thread, first quarter).

cmonkey
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Re: COVID topic vol 2

Post by cmonkey »

jacob wrote:
Sat Jan 09, 2021 9:48 am
Insofar we maintain the current game of behaviorally controlling R so as not to overwhelm the medical infrastructure, getting herd immunity the hard way is going to take years.
Maybe this has been addressed already, but even the CDC is estimating we only caught 1 out of 8 cases from March through September with a test. That might have increased a bit since then but I doubt we are catching even 1 in 5 cases today given many people catch it and don't know while many more will catch it and do nothing.

A rough calc would put the true case count at 23 million / .125 = 184 million. I think there's reason to be optimistic about herd immunity happening this year.

chenda
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Re: COVID topic vol 2

Post by chenda »

My current part time work from home job is with the local council. Today we got an email - everyone at the council did - asking if any of us would be interested in voluntarily working in intensive care units to help turn Covid patients and similar.

I was thinking it they are that desperate for hospital staff then it would make more sense to recruit vets and veterinary nurses, or even flight attendants, who actually have some medical training.

cmonkey
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Re: COVID topic vol 2

Post by cmonkey »

Ego wrote:
Sat Jan 02, 2021 10:24 pm
Ivermectin once again.
Good to see Ivermectin starting to be taken seriously here in the US. I've been following Chris Martenson since this all began and he and others were banging that drum way back in March...

I've also seen some anecdotes of Ivermectin helping long-haulers.

It didn't have to be this way!

George the original one
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Re: COVID topic vol 2

Post by George the original one »

cmonkey wrote:
Fri Jan 15, 2021 5:37 pm
I think there's reason to be optimistic about herd immunity happening this year.
I'm going to suggest "doubtful". For one thing, with the official CDC death rate at 0.65% [edited for correct decimal], you can expect COVID deaths to be in the neighborhood of 1-in-155 if everyone is infected. We're still a long ways from that (USA overall is about 1-in-840 dead from COVID), thus you must rely on vaccinations.

North Dakota and South Dakota, after hitting peak infections a week before Thanksgiving, may reach herd immunity in a month or two since they have isolated populations, but the cost has been tremendous: 1-in-550 have died and 80-85% of those deaths happened since October 1.

Their deaths are still better off than the NE USA (NJ, NY, Massachusetts, RI, & Connecticut), where higher population densities and the earliest mass deaths occurred before treatment was refined. NJ, for instance, has exceeded 1-in-450 dead of COVID. Infections are still raging in these states at per capita rates equal to the UK's and not peaking, likely because of population density.

Most of the states are like half that bad, so vaccine rollout is necessary before the nation will have herd immunity. I'm hopeful that Biden's team will do better than Operation Warpspeed's optimistic BS.
Last edited by George the original one on Sat Jan 16, 2021 4:28 pm, edited 1 time in total.

ducknald_don
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Re: COVID topic vol 2

Post by ducknald_don »

chenda wrote:
Fri Jan 15, 2021 5:40 pm
I was thinking it they are that desperate for hospital staff then it would make more sense to recruit vets and veterinary nurses, or even flight attendants, who actually have some medical training.
I think that has already been happening. The NHS lost a lot of staff to the airlines and once the shutdowns started many of them were encouraged back.

cmonkey
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Re: COVID topic vol 2

Post by cmonkey »

George the original one wrote:
Fri Jan 15, 2021 9:18 pm
I'm going to suggest "doubtful". For one thing, with the official CDC death rate at 0.0065%, you can expect COVID deaths to be in the neighborhood of 1-in-155 if everyone is infected. We're still a long ways from that (USA overall is about 1-in-840 dead from COVID), thus you must rely on vaccinations.
Is that the IFR or the CFR? If it's the CFR you can expect the IFR is 8 times smaller (which is almost certainly the case ). Whatever the case, it's been obvious from the beginning that the US never could control the spread of this nor will it ever control it since true numbers are much higher. I've seen numerous studies coming out this winter suggesting that the actual infection count is anywhere from 6 to 10 times the official numbers. Even ground zero was vastly undercounted. I think even 10 times higher is conservative since only 15 to 20 percent of people develop antibodies and that's how these studies are estimating the IFR, meaning up to 80% people can catch this and you'd never know it from a test.

cmonkey
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Re: COVID topic vol 2

Post by cmonkey »

I kept churning this math in my head because it didn't seem right. 1/155 is .65% not .0065%

If we assume they are estimating IFR using their model of true infections being 8 times official counts that would make the IFR = 402K / ( 24M / .125) = .21% which is 3 times smaller than their official IFR. Someone's not sharing data.

.21% would imply 1 in 475 will die of Covid which is 332m / 475 = 698K.

So we are 402K/698K = 57.5% of the way there?

IlliniDave
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Re: COVID topic vol 2

Post by IlliniDave »


cmonkey
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Re: COVID topic vol 2

Post by cmonkey »

IlliniDave wrote:
Sat Jan 16, 2021 2:38 pm
"Conspiracy theory" = correct?

https://www.state.gov/fact-sheet-activi ... -virology/
For some actual data on the subject dig into the links here, here and here. Not arguing one way or the other but the data is interesting.

IlliniDave
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Re: COVID topic vol 2

Post by IlliniDave »

cmonkey wrote:
Sat Jan 16, 2021 3:23 pm
For some actual data on the subject dig into the links here, here and here. Not arguing one way or the other but the data is interesting.
Thanks. I'll check those when I get some time.

Early last March I saw a very convincing analysis by a pair of evolutionary biologists, one of whom coincidentally had considerable experience with bats, who through educated judgement basically ruled out the wet market theory and direct bat-to-human transmission "in the wild" as very low probability events with the elephant in the room being the lab in Wuhan. They followed up with a thesis that the virus's proclivity for attacking a variety of human chronic pathological conditions could be the result of the type of tissue used to propagate those types of viruses in laboratories (human tissue that's somehow related to cancer). So the possibilities implied by the State Department are what I've been expecting since the early days of the pandemic. But in the public square any discussion centered on the Chinese lab was dismissed as conspiracy theory (and racist) so seeing it acknowledged by a mainstream outlet like CBS is a sea change. There's actually a lot of interesting sea changes since the election became official. But I think it's a big deal that there's a chance we'll now get to the bottom of what this virus really is. I'm keen to find out if it came out of a program that was allegedly funded by the US in ~2014.

George the original one
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Re: COVID topic vol 2

Post by George the original one »

cmonkey wrote:
Sat Jan 16, 2021 12:00 pm
Is that the IFR or the CFR?
0.65%... I had the decimal in the wrong place. This would be IFR, I believe, since CFR is totally dependent on testing reliability.

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Ego
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Re: COVID topic vol 2

Post by Ego »

Life and death is the ultimate zero sum game. But not the only game in town.

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UK-with-kids
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Re: COVID topic vol 2

Post by UK-with-kids »

Thanks @Ego - yes, dying is not the only way to lose your life.

I'm surprised to see that things have been worse for people living in rural areas and better in urban areas. Intuitively I'd expect the opposite as all the benefits of City life have been shut down.

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Re: COVID topic vol 2

Post by UK-with-kids »

In tonight's Coronavirus briefing the UK chief scientist Patrick Vallance stated that provisional data suggests the new UK variant may be 30% more deadly than the original virus. For every 1,000 men in their 60s who have the virus, 10 would die with the old version, but 13-14 would die with the new one.

Both the Pfizer and Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccines are believed to be just as effective against the UK variant, but there is more concern about the Brazil and South Africa versions because "they have certain features which means they might be less susceptible to vaccines".

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Ego
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Re: COVID topic vol 2

Post by Ego »

Professor of Global Public Health Devi Sridhar tells the BBC that travel restrictions will have to continue for the next year or two so that manufacturers can churn out vaccines for the new variants faster than the changes occur. A never ending game of whack a mole. She fails to acknowledge that if travel restrictions miraculously keep out the new variants then they can never be lifted without allowing the variants to enter.

https://twitter.com/BBCNewsnight/status ... 1044221952

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