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Medicine

1 In 5 New Yorkers May Have Had COVID-19, Antibody Tests Suggest (nytimes.com) 288

One of every five New York City residents tested positive for antibodies to the coronavirus, according to preliminary test results described by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo on Thursday, suggesting the virus had spread far more widely than known. The New York Times reports: The results also provided the tantalizing prospect that many New Yorkers who never knew they had been infected -- possibly as many as 2.7 million, the governor said -- had already encountered the virus, and survived. Mr. Cuomo also suggested the death rate was far lower than believed. The reliability of some early antibody tests to hit the market has been widely questioned, with some -- made in China without Food and Drug Administration approval -- found by health officials to be deeply flawed. Researchers across New York have worked in recent weeks to develop and validate their own, with federal approval.

In New York City, about 21 percent, or one of every five residents, tested positive for coronavirus antibodies during the state survey. The rate was 16.7 percent in Long Island, 11.7 percent in Westchester and Rockland Counties, and 3.6 percent in the rest of the state. Almost 14 percent of those tested in New York were positive, according to preliminary results from the state survey, which sampled approximately 3,000 people over two days at grocery and big-box stores. The governor suggested on Thursday that, based on the survey, the death rate in New York from Covid-19 would likely be far lower than previously believed, possibly 0.5 percent of those infected. On Thursday, Mr. Cuomo did not talk about any potential for immunity among those previously infected.

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1 In 5 New Yorkers May Have Had COVID-19, Antibody Tests Suggest

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  • Back to work! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by nonBORG ( 5254161 ) on Thursday April 23, 2020 @04:36PM (#59981722)
    thats 20% that can be back at work today, lets get ourselves out of this mess!
    • Re:Back to work! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by multi io ( 640409 ) <olaf.klischat@googlemail.com> on Thursday April 23, 2020 @04:42PM (#59981744)
      If you're one of the other 80%, and one of the 20% goes out and applies for the job that you wanted to apply to...well, it creates a great incentive for you and many others among the the 80% group to attend Corona parties, which would restart the whole mess that the hospitals have seen.
      • If you're one of the other 80%

        Most of them have been exposed, too. They tests suck.

    • Re:Back to work! (Score:4, Interesting)

      by MightyMartian ( 840721 ) on Thursday April 23, 2020 @04:43PM (#59981752) Journal

      Except that we have no idea how much immunity those antibodies confer. If they have a pretty short half life, those people may get sick again, or become asymptomatic carriers.

      • by PPH ( 736903 )

        Except that we have no idea how much immunity those antibodies confer.

        How many were asymptomatic? A proper survey would have included a few questions about symptoms. If most were and they catch it again, odds are pretty good that their immune systems will fight it off, just like the last time. At any rate, more people who had the disease and potentially spread it is an input into the rate of transmission calculation. It lowers it. At any rate, this all goes to stopping politicians from running around screaming with their hair on fire.

      • If you have antibodies you are not a carrier.

      • by jrumney ( 197329 )

        Except that we have no idea how much immunity those antibodies confer.

        I think it is more a case that we have no data on how long those antibodies stick around for.

    • You need around 60% for herd immunity to kick in. So they're about a third of the way there. It does suggest that they may be able to start taking cautious steps in that direction soon.. There's still enough susceptible people in fuel a second round of exponential growth.

      This also gives you some feeling for how bad the "take it on the chin" approach would have been. Stories out of the hospitals show doctors and nurses pushed to their limit. If the city just let nature take it's course they could have had tw

      • You actually need about 90% infection resistance for herd immunity to kick in.

        Secondly, if "the city" (whatever city you are talking about) had just let nature take its course, their would be an abundant supply of renewable energy.

        • Herd immunity depend on R0. I have not seen estimates that high https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] link goes to other diseases with on estimated R0 and their herd immunity thresholds.

        • The herd immunity threshold is 1 - 1/R0, so for the threshold to be 90% R0 would have to be 10.

          R0 itself is not fixed, so social distancing and other public health measures can actually reduce the threshold. That's the point of shutting down non-essential businesses. It's to get R0 down.

          If you can get R0 down to 1.5 you only need 33% immunity.

    • by jrumney ( 197329 )

      The big problem with "COVID-19 passports" as they have been proposed in other places, is that it provides an incentive for people to seek out infection so they can get the "passport" and get back to work. Hospitals are already over capacity without that.

      Anonymized antibody testing makes sense for getting a picture of how many cases were missed, and in certain areas like hospitals it might make sense for planning staff allocation to put presumed immune staff in the highest risk areas, but for deciding who

    • I'm looking forward to Sweden and now Georgia (U.S.) producing data. Get some real stats for the "just let it run its course" proponents. I'm sheltering (no sacrifice as a retiree), but I'm open to new facts.
  • by joe_frisch ( 1366229 ) on Thursday April 23, 2020 @04:43PM (#59981750)

    In the recent Santa Clara study https://www.medrxiv.org/conten... [medrxiv.org], the originally described high level of positive results(50X-80X reported) was within the 95% confidence level for false positives as stated in the study itself(!). So despite the media reporting a high number of cases, that is not really what the study stated. The study was very unfortunately written in a way that could easily give that impression to anyone who did not read extremely carefully

    So the question is what the statistical limits are on this study.

    While its tempting to pay attention to low statistics studies, keep in mind that there is a strong "publication bias" in that only studies with results above the false positive rate are likely to be tested. Personally I think anything below 95%CL should not be considered to have any validity, and would prefer >99% before considering the results seriously.

    • The Santa Clara study used volunteers, so the results aren't a statistically random sample. The Los Angeles study [usc.edu] is more interesting because it seems to have attempted to draw a representative sample. I haven't been able to find specific details for it though.
  • There are 21 suicides per 100,000 per point increase of unemployment [bryant.edu], which means about 70k deaths in the U.S. each point...and we're only projected to lose about 66k deaths from Covid-19 - we're currently at 42k deaths. It sure seems like the cure is going to be worse than the disease.
    • The psychology of being unemployed and helpless in a rich consumer-obsessed country is far different from being in the same boat as 40% of the rest of the country with extra bailouts and more help on the way.
    • by AvitarX ( 172628 )
      .1% of New York dead with 15% infection. .3% to get herd immunity (wild ass guess towards the middle of estimates). .3% of 300,000,000 = 900,000

      It's close.
      • Wrong calculation (Score:2, Insightful)

        by SuperKendall ( 25149 )

        .1% of New York dead with 15% infection..3% to get herd immunity

        Wrong.

        Where you have not factored in, is that you are not including in the number of people who are exposed but do not get infected, which would be quite high with 20% (average from the summary) already being infected and a lot of time having passed.

        So it's likely that over 60% have been exposed, and either had a mild reaction developing anti-bodies, or are simply not prone to catching Covid19 easily.

        NYC has already reached herd immunity. You

        • by AvitarX ( 172628 )
          Didn't the test that found 15% (state wide) or 20% (NYC) use anti-bodies?
        • Let's just open New York as our test. Everyone go out completely normally for 2 weeks.

          Now how to deal with rest of country that isn't NYC?

        • by barakn ( 641218 )

          Still trying to pump that "natural immunity" false narrative? If someone was exposed, but didn't get infected, they could get exposed again and get infected.

        • by raind ( 174356 )
          Many people have been infected and have no symptoms or limited ones. Testing would tell or at least help.
    • The New York study puts the Infection Fatality rate at 0.64%.

      Say 50% herd immunity * 327 million * 0.64% = 1 million dead.

      1,000,000 Covid deaths > 70,000 suicides from the medicine.

      • Those numbers are front loaded by deaths of elderly in group homes with weakened immune systems. Also, there will be people that are resistant to the virus without antibodies. The numbers still overstate exposure to deaths by quite a lot.
        • Weakened immune systems means you're more likely to have severe symptoms. That doesn't mean you're less likely to be exposed. And resistant people would be "resistant" thanks to antibodies... which is what they're testing for.

          Nobody had immunity this isn't the flu where this year's flu might be close enough to the antibodies you already have.

    • We're at 49k deaths, the 42k number is 2 days old. It's a fantastically optimistic projection to say only 66k people will die in the US, it'll be more than that in a week.
    • by barakn ( 641218 )

      Trump's heavy foot on the gas pedal of the economy meant we were going over the cliff one way or another. Unemployment was bound to rise. It's possible that the Trump economy would have led to a next great depression that would have been worse than the Covid-19 crisis, in which case it did us a favor and saved lives.

      And also, if unemployment leads to suicide, and unemployment is an inevitable feature of capitalism, that points out a literal fatal flaw in capitalism and suggests the need for better social

    • by sjames ( 1099 ) on Thursday April 23, 2020 @06:49PM (#59982220) Homepage Journal

      You're ignoring that before the shutdown, projected COVID deaths was MUCH higher.

      Also, most of the newly unemployed are furloughed rather than terminated and expect to resume their jobs, so the psychological effect is somewhat less.

      Your link is a 404.

    • by jrumney ( 197329 )

      Unemployment isn't the cure. It is a side effect of the economic effect of having a major pandemic, which would have happened anyway when the economy collapsed due to overrun health system and every workplace having outbreaks of debilitating disease. Remember, we have data on how the 1918 Influenza Pandemic affected our economy, and the states that did better economically were the ones who put the most restrictions in the quickest to stamp out the virus.

    • by Sloppy ( 14984 )

      we're only projected to lose about 66k deaths from Covid-19

      How do you know that?

  • These Numbers are pretty well in line with the initial modeling that some people are falsely claiming were doomsday scenarios.

    Let's look at New York's latest numbers, 13.9% of people (who likely have a positive selection bias). We'll assume it's perfectly representative and not over-representing. We'll take the numbers at face value.

    Let's use the low side of estimates for Herd immunity and use 60% of the population. 0.6 / 0.139 = 4.316x more infections * 17,671 NY Deaths = 76,277 projected deaths would ha

  • These are apparently people who volunteered while visiting a grocery store - so not a random sampling. We don't know if this results in those exposed to COVID-19 being over or underrepresented.

    Also we don't know what the false positive rate is for the antibody test being used, etc.

    • Article says they tuned the toward false negatives not false positives.

      But if they are using a test similar to the one in my state it's like 0.5% difference. So 19.5% vs 20%.

  • by Mike Van Pelt ( 32582 ) on Thursday April 23, 2020 @06:22PM (#59982130)

    Antibodies to "coronavirus"... Is this antibodies to the actual Covid-19 virus? Or corona viruses in general, which are one of the types of virus responsible for the many annoying diseases lumped together under the category "The Common Cold".

    (Not to mention that any testing that comes out of the Chinese dictatorship only passes standards for Political Reliability, anything resembling factual results is an unintended accident.)

  • by nagora ( 177841 ) on Friday April 24, 2020 @01:27AM (#59983086)

    The tests I've seen values for all give massive numbers of false positives (like >90% of +ves are false) but the important part is that -ve results are pretty reliable. I wouldn't reply on a journalist to understand or allow for this sort of thing.

  • NY Times, pay site. (Score:4, Informative)

    by MrL0G1C ( 867445 ) on Friday April 24, 2020 @02:52AM (#59983230) Journal

    Is is so much to ask that you link an article we can read?

    https://www.msn.com/en-us/news... [msn.com]

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/ne... [telegraph.co.uk]

    https://www.chicagotribune.com... [chicagotribune.com]

    https://www.nationalobserver.c... [nationalobserver.com]

    https://www.livescience.com/co... [livescience.com]

  • by MrL0G1C ( 867445 ) on Friday April 24, 2020 @03:37AM (#59983322) Journal

    The test results were very heavily skewed by the fact they selected people to test that were out shopping.

    Now, who is more likely to test positive? The person who carefully shops so as to avoid shopping more than once a fortnight. Or the person who is chomping at the bit to get out and pops out every day to buy a newspaper and 1 pint of milk? And then pops out for exercise, and finds other excuses to leave.

    They just tested the people who can't stay home.

    So to sum up, they tested people more likely to have the disease with a test of unknown reliability for an anti-body for which no-one knows how long it lasts.

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