Is COVID19 a hoax?

[Amused]

I'm not saying its a hoax at all. But that said I don't know of anybody who has it, or know anybody who knows someone who has it. Has anybody here know anyone with the virus? (Don't link news reports -- just someone you personally know) I work for a large multi state construction company with many employees, drivers, etc (and are exempt from the lockdown since we are considered critical business) and the worst I've heard is one driver was really sick and it was thought to be the virus but the employee tested negative.

And yes before you have to post it. I already know I'm a stupid idiot trumph kkkkthuglican supporter. (I'm not actually) As that's the liberals go to phrase these days about anything they disagree with or if someone brings up questions like this. But seriously does anybody know anybody personally?

Yes, a friend of my wife who is a real estate agent in Manhattan beach has it.

Manhattan Beach man with coronavirus has an urgent message for the rest of us

“I have no clue where I got it,” Greg Geilman said by phone Tuesday. “I could have picked it up at the gym, at Whole Foods, from a Trader Joe’s shopping cart. I have no idea…

www.dailybreeze.com

A number of people I know from the gym I train at have it. There was a rather large outbreak in my local community tied to a party for the Palos Verdes Mayor (At a Trump Golf Course, no less )they were tied to.

16 sick following former RPV mayor’s birthday party at Trump National [Updated Mar. 23, 2020]

16 of the 65 guests who attended a 70th birthday party for former Rancho Palos Verdes Councilwoman Susan Brooks at Trump National Golf Course Los Angeles on March 8 reported being ill in the following…

easyreadernews.com

 

[abj13]

Stanford University in some capacity tested some 3000 people and announced results several days ago and determined that the number of reported (i.e. tested) positive cases is somewhere between 1/50th to 1/80th of the actual positive cases ... i.e. determined by antibody testing. You very likely do know some people who have had it, they just don't know it. Antibody testing is going to be a big part of getting us out of the dumpster here.

I would be very careful using that study for any interpretation since it hasn't been peer-reviewed. There's some major methodological issues (the recruited subjects were from a Facebook ad = severe sample bias. Who is more likely to enroll? Probably someone who might have had symptoms in March and wants to know if they were infected), and their results don't quite jive with reality. If you use their numbers of mortality rate (~0.1%), for the numbers in NYC to make sense, every person in NYC would have to been infected and the number of deaths would have to have stopped over the weekend. That's not happening. The statistics apparently are a bit wonky too.

And even more worrisome, some of the authors of that study had penned an opinion piece in the WSJ saying that quarantine wouldn't be helpful before they made this study available online. With the above issues AND the conflict of interest with their WSJ opinion piece, I would be rather skeptical of their results. More testing needs to be done, but it a much more random and unbiased way, from authors who don't have the same conflicts of interest.

 

[Juiblex]

Yes, a friend of my wife who is a real estate agent in Manhattan beach has it.

Manhattan Beach man with coronavirus has an urgent message for the rest of us

“I have no clue where I got it,” Greg Geilman said by phone Tuesday. “I could have picked it up at the gym, at Whole Foods, from a Trader Joe’s shopping cart. I have no idea…

www.dailybreeze.com

A number of people I know from the gym I train at have it. There was a rather large outbreak in my local community tied to a party for the Palos Verdes Mayor (At a Trump Golf Course, no less )they were tied to.

16 sick following former RPV mayor’s birthday party at Trump National [Updated Mar. 23, 2020]

16 of the 65 guests who attended a 70th birthday party for former Rancho Palos Verdes Councilwoman Susan Brooks at Trump National Golf Course Los Angeles on March 8 reported being ill in the following…

easyreadernews.com

Thank you and to the ones who responded to my question. I didn't know we had an anandtech post about people affected.

 

[Indus]

Jared Diamond a well known Anthropologist from LA in an interview 5 minutes ago said he thinks Corona may in fact kill around 142 million worldwide.

He calls it a moderate disease.. 142 mil will be a let off. He said the trade in exotic animals must be stamped out.. or the next nasty may be another black death and the body bag count could be in Billions.

 

[pmv]

I would be very careful using that study for any interpretation since it hasn't been peer-reviewed. There's some major methodological issues (the recruited subjects were from a Facebook ad = severe sample bias. Who is more likely to enroll? Probably someone who might have had symptoms in March and wants to know if they were infected), and their results don't quite jive with reality. If you use their numbers of mortality rate (~0.1%), for the numbers in NYC to make sense, every person in NYC would have to been infected and the number of deaths would have to have stopped over the weekend. That's not happening. The statistics apparently are a bit wonky too.

And even more worrisome, some of the authors of that study had penned an opinion piece in the WSJ saying that quarantine wouldn't be helpful before they made this study available online. With the above issues AND the conflict of interest with their WSJ opinion piece, I would be rather skeptical of their results. More testing needs to be done, but it a much more random and unbiased way, from authors who don't have the same conflicts of interest.

Do you have a link for the source of your explanation of this study?

I've seen it cited elsewhere, entirely uncritically, as proven "science". It's very hard to make sense of all the conflicting claims out there, most of them with the names of various high-status well-qualified people or instituitions in some way associated with them...but almost never in a clearly cited peer-reviewed fashion. It's worse than climate change, with so much scope for bias.

 

[mikeymikec]

Has anybody here know anyone with the virus?

One of my American relatives has died from it.

 

[Muse]

Jared Diamond a well known Anthropologist from LA in an interview 5 minutes ago said he thinks Corona may in fact kill around 142 million worldwide.

He calls it a moderate disease.. 142 mil will be a let off. He said the trade in exotic animals must be stamped out.. or the next nasty may be another black death and the body bag count could be in Billions.

I just read Jack London's "The Scarlet Plague" ... written in 1910. It's what I would call an apocalyptic sci-fi novelette (around 70 pages) about a pandemic that hits in 2012, killing practically the entire human race, and prophetically London had that at 8 billion people. The central character was 27 at the time, and the story is told by that man at age 87, when he's the only (known) person on the planet who was alive at the time. Humanity as far as known to the survivors then is maybe 350 in number, and as far as they know, limited to the western United States.

It's a free download as PDF from The Gutenberg Project... I read it on my Kindle.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

I had the same experience with a middle-aged grocery shopper. We were both wearing masks before the practice became prevalent, and I suggested that we had the right idea in common.

So she comes up with this remark that "We should make China pay for the cost of this!"

Oddly, the virus originates with a species of bat the size of a large moth. It was transmitted in Chineses wet-markets -- a traditional phenomenon indicative of "freedoms" the Chinese have as compared to our lives here under the tyrannical USDA and the FDA.

 

[abj13]

Do you have a link for the source of your explanation of this study?

I've seen it cited elsewhere, entirely uncritically, as proven "science". It's very hard to make sense of all the conflicting claims out there, most of them with the names of various high-status well-qualified people or instituitions in some way associated with them...but almost never in a clearly cited peer-reviewed fashion. It's worse than climate change, with so much scope for bias.

Here's the PDF of the study so far:

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.14.20062463v1.full.pdf

There's been a large pushback on Twitter discussing the scientific merits of the study. The Mercury News does a good job summarizing some of the issues. Andrew Gelman's blog, a professor of statistics, goes into greater details of the issues behind the numbers and study design. Gelman's critiques are very much valid to me. There's a major issue behind the study's analysis of the specificity of the test and how it affects the statistical modeling. Essentially, in the worst case scenario, all of the "positive" test results could be false positives, based on the numbers provided by the study authors, but they go about as if this isn't an issue in their study. It is, in fact, a major issue.

In the end, unless that paper is significantly edited, I think its going to end up in the camp of papers discarded for being useless. But this is the issue with science trying to move too quickly in getting studies into the media spotlight. This is why some people will continue to peddle the false papers about how COVID-19 has sequences related to HIV, how there's two strains of COVID-19, or how hydroxychloroquine is a wonder drug... even though once analyzed by others, those findings were soundly questioned by the scientific community. Yet, those stories got disseminated well before the scientific community could review and dispel the claims.

 

[pmv]

I just read Jack London's "The Scarlet Plague" ... written in 1910. It's what I would call an apocalyptic sci-fi novelette (around 70 pages) about a pandemic that hits in 2012, killing practically the entire human race, and prophetically London had that at 8 billion people. The central character was 27 at the time, and the story is told by that man at age 87, when he's the only (known) person on the planet who was alive at the time. Humanity as far as known to the survivors then is maybe 350 in number, and as far as they know, limited to the western United States.

It's a free download as PDF from The Gutenberg Project... I read it on my Kindle.

Jack London was an interesting guy - socialist but also kind of racist...but he got very noticeably less racist over time, as he came to reconsider his earlier views. A fact that seems kind of hopeful. The opposite trajectory to some figures.

Edit - my uncle was a fan of his - unfortunately I seem to have entirely lost the concentration-span for reading novels.

 

[pmv]

Here's the PDF of the study so far:

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.14.20062463v1.full.pdf

There's been a large pushback on Twitter discussing the scientific merits of the study. The Mercury News does a good job summarizing some of the issues. Andrew Gelman's blog, a professor of statistics, goes into greater details of the issues behind the numbers and study design. Gelman's critiques are very much valid to me. There's a major issue behind the study's analysis of the specificity of the test and how it affects the statistical modeling. Essentially, in the worst case scenario, all of the "positive" test results could be false positives, based on the numbers provided by the study authors, but they go about as if this isn't an issue in their study. It is, in fact, a major issue.

In the end, unless that paper is significantly edited, I think its going to end up in the camp of papers discarded for being useless. But this is the issue with science trying to move too quickly in getting studies into the media spotlight. This is why some people will continue to peddle the false papers about how COVID-19 has sequences related to HIV, how there's two strains of COVID-19, or how hydroxychloroquine is a wonder drug... even though once analyzed by others, those findings were soundly questioned by the scientific community. Yet, those stories got disseminated well before the scientific community could review and dispel the claims.

Useful to know - I've seen people citing that study very strongly as 'proof' that we will soon have herd immunity, and that, therefore, not locking-down and letting the virus spread is the way to go, rather than hoping for a vaccine.

 

[Muse]

Jack London was an interesting guy - socialist but also kind of racist...but he got very noticeably less racist over time, as he came to reconsider his earlier views. A fact that seems kind of hopeful. The opposite trajectory to some figures.

Edit - my uncle was a fan of his - unfortunately I seem to have entirely lost the concentration-span for reading novels.

The Scarlet Plague is a quick read. I too have little patience to read an entire novel, but this is about 1/4 the length of a typical novel. London's imagination was prolific. He imagined what would happen if 99.99% of the population in California (which was at, say, 40 billion) suddenly died. IOW, if maybe 25 people remained alive in the whole state.

London had working class origins in Oakland, not surprising that he evolved from semi-racist thinking to more open minded views as he developed as a person from an adventurer to a writer to a famous writer.

 

[Indus]

I'm not saying its a hoax at all. But that said I don't know of anybody who has it, or know anybody who knows someone who has it. Has anybody here know anyone with the virus? (Don't link news reports -- just someone you personally know) I work for a large multi state construction company with many employees, drivers, etc (and are exempt from the lockdown since we are considered critical business) and the worst I've heard is one driver was really sick and it was thought to be the virus but the employee tested negative.

And yes before you have to post it. I already know I'm a stupid idiot trumph kkkkthuglican supporter. (I'm not actually) As that's the liberals go to phrase these days about anything they disagree with or if someone brings up questions like this. But seriously does anybody know anybody personally?

My wife's best friend's partner (gay) just passed away of coronavirus 2 days ago. No underlying health conditions other than being 52 years old white male.

Want me to post a pic?

A gay couple.. 1 alive, 1 dead when both were healthy and I and my wife met them last month.

 

[Indus]

I have an update. Just learned the guy who does my taxes (who I've known for years).. had covid. He was in the hospital for 2 weeks but they discharged him today. He's still weak but overjoyed to be home and wanted to call his friends and business customers that he's alive and well and can still do my taxes.

 

[pmv]

Here's the PDF of the study so far:

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.14.20062463v1.full.pdf

There's been a large pushback on Twitter discussing the scientific merits of the study. The Mercury News does a good job summarizing some of the issues. Andrew Gelman's blog, a professor of statistics, goes into greater details of the issues behind the numbers and study design. Gelman's critiques are very much valid to me. There's a major issue behind the study's analysis of the specificity of the test and how it affects the statistical modeling. Essentially, in the worst case scenario, all of the "positive" test results could be false positives, based on the numbers provided by the study authors, but they go about as if this isn't an issue in their study. It is, in fact, a major issue.

In the end, unless that paper is significantly edited, I think its going to end up in the camp of papers discarded for being useless. But this is the issue with science trying to move too quickly in getting studies into the media spotlight. This is why some people will continue to peddle the false papers about how COVID-19 has sequences related to HIV, how there's two strains of COVID-19, or how hydroxychloroquine is a wonder drug... even though once analyzed by others, those findings were soundly questioned by the scientific community. Yet, those stories got disseminated well before the scientific community could review and dispel the claims.

Also stumbled on this discussion. However, stats at this level really makes my brain hurt, it's beyond my educational level. Frustrating, rather.

Concerns with that Stanford study of coronavirus prevalence | Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science

 

[abj13]

Also stumbled on this discussion. However, stats at this level really makes my brain hurt, it's beyond my educational level. Frustrating, rather.

Concerns with that Stanford study of coronavirus prevalence | Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science

Yeah, the stats are getting pretty complex, and I don't fully understand how they stratified the cohort. I understand the general concepts, but not the actual math behind it.

The specificity issue makes sense to me. What everyone is pointing out that the authors established how well the assay worked on a small cohort they analyzed and from the manufacturer. In total, they tested 401 samples that should all be negative, but two were positive. This suggests the test has issues with false positives, which is true of most tests in medicine, but the performance here (2/401) is exceptionally good, to the point that its almost unlikely (but that's an aside opinion of mine). Based on the 2 false positives, the authors can say that it has a specificity of 399/401= 99.5 (or a false positive rate of 0.5 [1-99.5]). Because they ran their assay on 401 samples, and not infinity samples, they cannot be certain that the test has a specificity of 99.5, so they provide a 95% confidence interval, which is 98.3-99.9. All of that was done correctly. The problem is what the confidence interval is telling us. While the researchers obtained a specificity of 99.5% on one day with 401 samples, the exact specificity of the test remains only an estimate. If they could run infinity samples, they can be 95% confident that it would end-up somewhere between 98.3 to 99.9.

The 98.3% is the issue. It means that the test could return false positives as high as 1.7%. When the authors ran the test, 1.5% of the samples are positive. What the authors cannot discern, are all 1.5% true positives, or are they false positives? They just told us that up to 1.7% of results could be false positives! Based on the testing dynamics of the test reported by the authors, every positive result they obtained could be a false positive.

Even after all of the authors adjustments and stratification, the lower limit of their confidence of what the prevalence of COVID19 was in the Bay area should be zero (meaning nobody was positive, all positive results from the test are false positives). Yet somehow, the authors don't report this, and provide an adjusted prevalence of 2.5% to 4.2%. If anything it should be 0 to 4.2% (assuming the upper limit doesn't change when taking the specificity issue).

From what everyone can tell, the authors ignored the 98.3% value, and used only 99.5% in their calculations, which is wrong. Somebody screwed up, and this problem completely alters what the authors can conclude from their study.

 

[mopardude87]

My cousin has it or maybe had? IDK we are now on non talking terms but those her last words more or less before i quit talking to her then i live with a "friend" who thinks its all fake and some dem plot to lose trump the election. Me i know its real and if anything, the news even lies about the numbers and everything. Look at Fox its being sued and i say its about damn time.

Won't lie about being nervous about living with my "friend" i have to constantly distance myself out of fear and wait for Karma to set in, sadly i think in this case he is going to catch it. Karma has typically been the virus for all the nay sayers. Gonna be sad losing a friend of 15 years.....