Reply With Quote“The Beginning of the End of the Pandemic .. Declares Dr.Stephen Smith MD.”
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The Stanford study on assessing the the prevalence of COVID-19 is out: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...463v1.full.pdf
Nice quick read, with all caveats laid-out upfront. Read yourself and see. Estimated prevalence between 2.5% to 4.2%, estimated infection fatality rate of 0.1-0.2%. Right in the ballpark of flu.
Bruno: are we all still going to die?
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“The Beginning of the End of the Pandemic .. Declares Dr.Stephen Smith MD.”
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And hopefully the end of the reputation of Dr. Anthony Fauci. Here are the rules he helped develop:
The Corona Rules (as seen on Facebook):
1. Basically, you can't leave the house for any reason, but if you have to, then you can.
2. Masks are useless, but maybe you have to wear one, it can save you, it is useless, but maybe it is mandatory as well.
3. Stores are closed, except those that are open.
4. You should not go to hospitals unless you have to go there. Same applies to doctors, you should only go there in case of emergency, provided you are not too sick.
5. This virus is deadly but still not too scary, except that sometimes it actually leads to a global disaster.
6. Gloves won't help, but they can still help.
7. Everyone needs to stay HOME, but it's important to GO OUT.
8. There is no shortage of groceries in the supermarket, but there are many things missing when you go there in the evening, but not in the morning. Sometimes.
9. The virus has no effect on children except those it affects.
10. Animals are not affected, but there is still a cat that tested positive in Belgium in February when no one had been tested, plus a few tigers here and there…
11. You will have many symptoms when you are sick, but you can also get sick without symptoms, have symptoms without being sick, or be contagious without having symptoms. Oh, my..
12. In order not to get sick, you have to eat well and exercise, but eat whatever you have on hand and it's better not to go out, well, but no…
13. It's better to get some fresh air, but you get looked at very wrong when you get some fresh air, and most importantly, you don't go to parks or walk. But don’t sit down, except that you can do that now if you are old, but not for too long or if you are pregnant (but not too old).
14. You can't go to retirement homes, but you have to take care of the elderly and bring food and medication.
15. If you are sick, you can't go out, but you can go to the pharmacy.
16. You can get restaurant food delivered to the house, which may have been prepared by people who didn't wear masks or gloves. But you have to have your groceries decontaminated outside for 3 hours. Pizza too?
17. Every disturbing article or disturbing interview starts with " I don't want to trigger panic, but…"
18. You can't see your older mother or grandmother, but you can take a taxi and meet an older taxi driver.
19. You can walk around with a friend but not with your family if they don't live under the same roof.
20. You are safe if you maintain the appropriate social distance, but you can’t go out with friends or strangers at the safe social distance.
21. The virus remains active on different surfaces for two hours, no, four, no, six, no, we didn't say hours, maybe days? But it takes a damp environment. Oh no, not necessarily.
22. The virus stays in the air - well no, or yes, maybe, especially in a closed room, in one hour a sick person can infect ten, so if it falls, all our children were already infected at school before it was closed. But remember, if you stay at the recommended social distance, however in certain circumstances you should maintain a greater distance, which, studies show, the virus can travel further, maybe.
23. We count the number of deaths but we don't know how many people are infected as we have only tested so far those who were "almost dead" to find out if that's what they will die of…
24. We have no treatment, except that there may be one that apparently is not dangerous unless you take too much (which is the case with all medications).
25. We should stay locked up until the virus disappears, but it will only disappear if we achieve collective immunity, so when it circulates… but we must no longer be locked up for that?
26. It's ok to work if you're considered essential, but you can't work if your job isn't essential, and those who are essential are interacting with many, but are in no way contributing to the issue.
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I’ve been routinely making short trips to public places a couple times a week. Pick an item up here and there etc. and To basically gauge people’s temperament.
I live in Boise Idaho... today I hit Costco. 50% had masks on, people were still friendly, practicing proper distances, not a sense of panic at all. The place was packed.
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SS Radio #52 is up: YouTube
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I promise I'm not being intentionally obtuse here, but how does that work in a country with a population of 330 million? If we test 1 million a week, does that not leave 329 million or so potentially infected and asymptomatic people walking around? How does that approach provide the data necessary to make a fact-based decision?Originally Posted by LimieJosh
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Agree, it will be useful to check the results in Sweden against other countries using a strict lockdown approach. Sweden appear to have adopted an instant “herd immunity” that may result in high number of deaths for them in the short term, whereas other countries in lockdown are simply prolonging the number of deaths recorded until a vaccine is found in 18 months or so. Unlike the mainstream media, I think it's more sensible to focus on the overall total death figures rather than deaths simply involving COVID19. On top of the usual daily death toll, this crisis is obviously going to cause additional deaths in all three categories below:
1) COVID19 related deaths
2) Non related COVID 19 deaths i.e. Cancellation of treating/preventing serious illness such as heart disease, cancer & cerebrovascular diseases etc
3) Deaths caused by societal/financial impact i.e. murder, suicide, accidents in the home etc.
Looking at my country (UK) our latest published data for the week 28 March – 03 April shows the following
All deaths – 16,387*
All deaths (5-year average) – 10,305
*Includes COVID19 deaths – 3,475
As you can see we've seen a significant increase in deaths compared to our 5 year average, post inception of our lockdown (23 March) – 6,082 (59%). Part of these deaths have obviously been attributed to COVID19 which leaves us with 2,607 additional deaths linked to either point 2, 3 or some other unforeseen circumstances.
I think the simplest measurement of a country's success/failure in responding to the crisis based on the “death” argument alone will depend on the percentage of increase in a country's death rate at the end of the year against the previous 5 year average. Rank each country in percentage order and check each country's decision to put in place a lockdown or take a more relaxed approach. Unfortunately we'll have to wait until the end of 2020 to truly determine each country's success in dealing with the crisis. Time will tell.
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I have debated exactly that point.
For reasons, that I have stated several times (in addition to several well-known epidemiologists), I believe social distancing is ineffective in the short term and harmful in the long term.
And instead, a fearful, wilfully ignorant public views him with 70%-80% approval. The people want freedom from choice.
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There is a major red flag in this paper. In short, their high estimate for infection prevalence may be due to poor estimates of the sensitivity of the antibody test kit. The uncertainty about its sensitivity may not be correctly propagated to their final confidence intervals.
The antibody test kit seems quite specific, but may be terribly unspecific:
The massive discrepancy between the two test sets should give anyone pause. (I applaud the authors for performing this confirmation to begin with.) They say the uncertainty about sensitivity is propagated, via the delta method, to the final confidence interval for IFR. However, the delta method is an asymptotic approximation. The sample size for Santa Clara prevalence is large (3000+), but the sample size to assess test kit performance is very small (<50), so you would not expect the normal approximation to kick in for the sensitivity estimates.Our estimates of sensitivity based on the manufacturer’s and locally tested data were 91.8% (using the lower estimate based on IgM, 95 CI 83.8- 96.6%) and 67.6% (95 CI50.2-82.0%), respectively.
If I were a reviewer on this paper, I would ask them to numerically verify (using simple simulations) the final estimates they derived using asymptotic approximations. It is obvious the estimate of infection prevalence would be inflated substantially if we (incorrectly) expect a lot of false negatives.
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Experience shows that if you do it early enough, you can be even somewhat gentle. If you wait too long, you need a very strict quarantine, much closer to your Army analogy than what you are seeing now in some US cities. If you wait too long, there is not a whole lot you can do even with the quarantine in place, you gotta wait for the virus to burn itself out. You can then start to ease up on the quarantine, but the question is how long until another outbreak. The idea of locking things down and then reopening after a short period seems pretty counter-intuitive, you should either enforce strict quarantines until you find a cure, or you do the Swedish thing and let the virus run its course. I don't really trust China with their case numbers, so Italy, Spain and the US are gonna offer some good data on what happens after the lockdowns, since the governments there waited for a long time to enforce quarantines, have a high number of cases and fatalities and are set to start opening up at some time in the near future. Best case scenario is you can contain the spread with closed borders, I don't see how it can be done if you open them.
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