OSUmetstud

Dude. Theyre positive. Its just that theyre late in their illness. We missed when they were actually infectious. Thats the point that michael mina is making. Not that they don't or didn't just have covid.

People are being tested way too late. What good is it to find someone with mild symptoms who was actually contagious 7 or 10 days ago? How can you contact trace that far back?

Its not a narrative thing. The FDA initially approved the highly sensitive RT-PCR tests that are excellent for clinic diagnosis. Thats their typical purview. They are not tailored to only find contagious patients in a community setting. Dr. Michael Mina is big on pushing for a different category of testing...one for the community survaillance. Those tests would be much cheaper, could be taken at home and often. Theyre not as sensitive but the people that need to be found to slow community transmission have very high levels of viral RNA which would be found by these new tests.

Yes of course. The disease kills different demographics. There was a study that compared the two in NYC, the pandemic wave there was about 70% as deadly as the spanish flu.

I think the southern wave peaked last month. Excess death data seems to suggest that. Rt numbers are generally below 1 there. The case numbers aren't the only thing to look at...hospitalizations have been falling and deaths started falling a few weeks ago. Can that be maintained with school starting? Maybe not.

The prevailing theory for the mortality of Spanish flu is a high prevalence of secondary bacterial infections which would have been more treatable today. The spanish flu still hit in 3 or 4 waves over a few years.

Thats actually not what the cdc site says. It says that covid is the only cause mentioned in 6 percent of cases. Pneumonia or ARDS being mentioned along with covid would fall into that 94 percent.

Things are objectively getting better in the south currently though.

Infected per capita is currently higher in the south than the north thats just not debatable.

Their gdp fall and unemployment numbers are better than the us.

Well then just **** it then. Im not sure why I bother.

Okay. Why is that relevant?

It seems that the countries are doing reasonably well economically are the ones that have covid more under control. Germany is doing relatively well economically for example.

Crazy. Is this the most expensive one in history?

200700 excess deaths per NYT/CDC through July 25th https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/05/05/us/coronavirus-death-toll-us.html https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm

They apparently didn't admit many of the 70-80+ year old patients into ICU care...just gave them pain meds and let them die. https://www.wsj.com/articles/coronavirus-is-taking-a-high-toll-on-swedens-elderly-families-blame-the-government-11592479430

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2769034 This study, the SK study, and the GA summer camp outbreak aren't particularly favorable for the hope that kids don't transmit well. I think you have to assume that kids transmit just as well as adults as the default when planning for reopening.

NYS school metrics are based on community transmission. I really wish we ge to the point where we regularly test students but that's the best alternative. You just can't open normally if you're having lots of community transmission.

I'm pretty sure the current rapid tests (like the Abbott idnow) are the similar ones Michael Mina is talking about in that twitter thread. We dont need the sensitivity of the pcr test for community survaillance and beating down R. The pcr test only outperforms the rapid tests when there's a very little viral RNA.

How do we know ANYTHING???

The scientists aren't making up the the sensitivity and specificity of the diagnostic test.

False negatives are way more common than false positives. False positives are extremely rare and are most likely the result of contamination. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/covid-19-false-positives-1.5555322

Not sure this is true stebo. Theres a strong push to get more frequent antigen testing off the ground with cheaper paper strip type testing. We are testing a great deal of the people far too late in the disease course for any benefit for contract tracing. On average, the people who are testing positve are no longer infectious so its only serving as a diagnosis, nothing more.

Asymptomatic vs. symptomatic is subjective. The tolerance for symptoms in people is heterogeneous. It seems though that you can still see changes in the lungs for a lot of these people who aren't felling symptoms.

It was like 1100. It was the results of the stage 1/2 oxford/azn vaccine. The moderna one last week was stage 1 results and that was 45 people. I'm more hopeful than ever will have a viable vaccine in early 2021.