Covid may be far more widespread than we thought (opens in new tab)

He's still an idiot. He chose to believe that not because of research or statistics or the advice of people with expertise, but because it was convenient. This was at the beginning of March when there had only been 11 deaths. He was making the argument that this is no worse than the normal seasonal flu, because he was loathe to take any drastic preventative action that might disrupt his precious stock market.

Well, here we are now, thousands have died, with thousands more on the way, and the economic damage has already been done. That's what happens when you let an idiot run the country.

Who do we believe a bullshit artist at the economist or Bob Wachter Chair, UCSF Dept of Medicine.

> @Bob_Wachter > 3/ Another interesting #: @ucsf, we only test pts w/ symptoms, who all think "I have Covid.” But only ~4% of our tests are +, meaning most folks who think they have it, don’t.

https://twitter.com/Bob_Wachter/status/1247722427620012032

Even an idiot is right twice a day?

I was terribly sick in early February, in CA. I went to my urgent care multiple times as I got worse.

The doctor tested me for influenza, but told me that he was seeing hundreds of patients, all day every day, with "an unusual flu" where they were mildly sick for a few days, recover, and then suddenly got much worse with high fevers and chest infections -- and most of those patients were turning up with negative influenza tests. But influenza tests have a high false negative rate, so just because I was negative on the test didn't mean anything. The doc said that this year, the influenza test only seemed to show positive for folks that had a high fever the first day of their illness (which, between you and me, is very common with influenza and very uncommon for COVID)

I was out of work for over a week, and only got out of bed when I had no choice the entire time.

None of my doctors asked me about travel or contact with recent travelers, and nobody ever even suggested getting a coronavirus test.

When I got back to work a week later, I learned that nearly 10% of my office had gotten sick either the same day as me or while I was out.

Did we all have COVID-19?

maybe. Maybe not.

None of us were tested. None of us will turn up in the COVID statistics.

But in early/mid February, there definitely was some coronavirus here -- we had a few known travel cases, and we had tons of travelers between all regions of China and all parts of CA. It is entirely possible for folks to have unknowingly brought the virus here in moderate numbers.

> I was pretty sick in late February, and ended up in the urgent care at my local Kaiser. It was packed at the time too. Seemed like everyone was sick with the flu.

The 2019-2020 seasonal flu has also been relatively bad compared to many other years.

https://time.com/5758953/flu-season-2019-2020/: 2019-2020 Flu Season on Track to Be Especially Severe, New CDC Data Suggests (Jan 4th).

My son had a nasty bout of pneumonia in late January / early February, so I'll be interested in an antibody test for him when they become available.

It might actually have been the flu. At least for me (in North Carolina), this year's flu vaccine was a miss, so I ended up sick anyway.

> I'm not trivializing this kind of effort: it takes rigorous sampling designs and dozens or hundreds of field workers, among other things. It's intense but very straightforward. Political pollsters (and thousands of researchers in different fields) do it every day.

I am trivializing it, when compared to the cost of stopping down there economy as we've done.

If there a chance the results can restart the economy a bit earlier, it almost doesn't matter how much it will cost.

A Stanford MD PhD who had a recent article in the Wall St Journal was interviewed on video[1]. In the video he refers to this very denominator-related test being forthcoming. There are two things I don't understand. First, why did this have to wait for some approved(?) antibody test, rather than being tried with a presumably research-grade test to start?? Second (physicist talking here), to get a rough estimate (to within a factor) whether exposure has already silently _significantly_ spread, why not relax some rigor in the sampling design and just sample 100-1000 geographically-diverse people to get _some_ estimate that could at least speak to the "is exposure already widespread?" question?

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-UO3Wd5urg0

My understanding is this hasn't been done yet because we still don't have enough tests for all the people who have symptoms or might have the disease due to circumstances. But the number of available tests is going up very rapidly, so maybe pretty soon we will be able to do that sort of study.

Of course, our stable genius president has been insisting for months that there is no shortage of tests.

By the way, another way to go at this question is to test for antibodies, and that is also being developed very rapidly.

One of the study authors addressed this on Twitter. It’s certainly not hard proof, but 8 million extra cases would be a whole lot of hypochondriacs. Thread is short and worth a read. https://mobile.twitter.com/inschool4life/status/124762000834...

I don’t think anyone is claiming that it suppressed and contained itself. They’re claiming it’s more widespread and more mild. There’s a good graphic in the economist article showing two different peaks that look the same early on.

Could it be because AI is an overhyped rehash of the AI craze that swept academia and industry in the 1980s, only to collapse in the 'AI winter' as everyone realised the truth? We use AI/ML for trivial purposes right now. Multivariate statistical analysis beats AI in many domains. Covid is a real-world, grown-up problem. It isn't identifying pictures of cats, or creating obscene chatbots (remember Tay?). So AI has been shown up to be a duff non-solution.