6 hours ago, birdguy said:

Checked the paper products shelves and while not stacked full there are paper towel and toilet paper packs available.

Here in Maryland, paper towel supply is getting back to normal but toilet paper is still a problem, and as of this morning's grocery delivery, fresh chicken seems to be an emerging issue (yet another sentence I never thought I'd write).

It seems to be something like rolling blackouts, only with food.

5 hours ago, dave2013 said:

A recent study conducted in Santa Clara County, California estimates that 48,000 - 81,000 people have been infected in that area, which is 50-85 times the number of confirmed cases reported.  This means that the death rate drops by the same factor, which puts Covid-19's death rate somewhere between a little worse than the flu to twice as bad as the flu.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/17/health/santa-clara-coronavirus-infections-study/index.html

Of course, this is just one study, but I have read similar findings and opinions of other doctors and scientists that put the death rate somewhere between 0.2 and 1.0%.

Dave

That would be fantastic news if it was true.  I'd want to know more, though, about how specific the tests were.  A hospital physician friend was telling me that there are issues with some of the serologic antibody tests because they don't easily distinguish between antibodies for ncov and antibodies for other coronaviruses  That alone would drive the positive rate way up because you'd be flagging people who had the seasonal flu.

If you click through the CNN story to the journal article, there are some other interesting questions raised in the comments.

I don't mean to criticize - it's great that these studies are getting done, and they all contribute in an area where we've been dealing pretty much blind.  It's just really hard in these early stages to know what's going on - as any researcher would tell you.  I'm trying to read as many as I can and stay hopeful while letting some questions roll through, too.

Definitely worth watching that one to see how it develops.

6 hours ago, dave2013 said:

A recent study conducted in Santa Clara County, California estimates that 48,000 - 81,000 people have been infected in that area, which is 50-85 times the number of confirmed cases reported.  This means that the death rate drops by the same factor, which puts Covid-19's death rate somewhere between a little worse than the flu to twice as bad as the flu.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/17/health/santa-clara-coronavirus-infections-study/index.html

Of course, this is just one study, but I have read similar findings and opinions of other doctors and scientists that put the death rate somewhere between 0.2 and 1.0%.

Dave

The Imperial model used by the UK uses 0.9% if I recall correctly. 

The calculation that the Lancet paper came to using Diamond Princess and the sampling of returnees from Wuhan was around 0.7%. 

You can read the Santa Clara paper on medrxiv. It recruited by Facebook ads.  Its therefore possible that people who thought they had been exposed might have have been more receptive to the appeal (which they acknowledge as a potential bias in the paper).  Note that they actually had 50 positives out of 3300 tests (1.4%) .  It gets scaled up to 2.5% - 4%  because the test population  disproportionally consisted of white women (soccer moms?!)  

The testing was carried out on the 3rd - 4th April.  They explain that they assumed that antibodies could be detected 3 days after infection and thus took the figure to represent the number infected up to 1st April.  They then projected forward deaths to 21st April to allow for the time lag from infection to death. 

Their calculated IFR is 0.12 -0.2% which is a lower than the concensus but not by 50 times.  The 50-85 times claim is misleading its the ratio of estimated infections to positive tests.  

The Dutch study was  antibody based but used blood donations and the profile of a blood donor might not match the population.  They suggest that 3% of their population were infected at the beginning of April so roughly 500K.   Following the same logic as the Santa Clara paper if we look at deaths today its 3600.  So projected forward to 21st it will be approx 4K  which gives an IFR of around 0.8% 

 

Edited April 18, 20206 yr by SteveFx

For you number crunchers.  Numbers from a rural state...New Mexico (Pop 2.1 million)

Total cases - 1711

Total Hospitalized - 242

Currently Hospitalized - 96

Total recovered - 382

Total Deaths - 51  (22 in the Albuquerque Metro Area; 24 in the Navajo Nation)

Cases in Chaves County (where I live) 21

 

Noel 

 

Edited April 18, 20206 yr by birdguy

On the whole testing discussion - science writer Laurie Garret is one of my go-to sources for anything to do with pandemics - going back to early HIV days.  She posted a link to this study - a literature review designed to answer these questions (which offer a good summary of key things we don't know yet):

A PDF of the study itself (fair warning - it's dense) can be found here.

Overall a good look at where researchers are focusing right now.

15 minutes ago, birdguy said:

For you number crunchers.  Numbers from a rural state...New Mexico (Pop 2.1 million)

Thanks!

Johns Hopkins is a really good source for both global and US data - including a US map and county-level breakdown that updates daily.  One of a couple of sites that makes it much easier to keep track.

Here's a sharp critique of the Stanford serology study, just posted in a Twitter thread by a UC Santa Cruz researcher in a Twitter thread (link is to the first post, the rest are below).

He says he also posted comments on the paper itself.

If he's right, it needs work.

Edited April 18, 20206 yr by Alan_A

This is rather depressing..

this is the imperial model in particular the effect of social distancing etc.

https://mrc-ide.github.io/covid19estimates/#/interventions

If you then use the menu to look at a country like Germany you can see how all the interventions before lockdown serve to reduce Rt a little but it’s only lockdown that makes a big difference and gets Rt below 1.

that being the case I don’t see how we can relax anything other than say letting schools go back,

 

2 minutes ago, SteveFx said:

I don’t see how we can relax anything other than say letting schools go back,

I would be wary of that, too. I sometimes jokingly think of my little niece (12 years old) as little typhoid mary, as she is almost constantly sniffling, coughing and etc from something caught at school.

Historically, these things almost inevitably bounce right off me despite her best efforts to invade my space with her latest schoolwork, her latest drawing of me, an animated discussion of girl scouts or her latest encounters with dragons.

Her grandmother, not so much.

My elder cousin catches stuff from my niece like passing the baton in a race, and is often sick for weeks afterward. I can't imagine it's all that different in other families, and I can just imagine all those millions of cute little plague carriers scurrying home to infect everything in sight.

Not an attractive prospect. I suspect I would survive just fine, and I'm only theoretically worried about myself despite younger family members deciding that i'm made of weak porcelain teetering on the edge of a table in a room full of bouncing cats; but really, why even take the chance with the rest of the family?

 

Absolutely agreed. While my youngest daughter was at primary school, her Mum worked there as the school cook. Between them there was almost never a day when one or other of them was not trying to throw off one sniffle or another. For some reason, I was mostly unaffected but I am not so young now (67 now, in my early 50s then). My daughter is training to be a nurse.

 

Edited April 18, 20206 yr by Reader

My colleague who just tested negative for covid got his strep throat (which is what it turned out to be) from one of his six-year-old twins.  Contagious stuff is a constant feature in their household.

When I lived in Germany, I had one kid in the US DOD elementary school, one in the German elementary school, and one in the German Kindergarten.  My house was the crossroads for every bug in Western Europe.

And that experience is why I'm certain that we're going to see new cases go parabolic again within a few weeks of allowing the schools to go back into session (or day cares to go back into operation, which are the same from a biological exposure perspective).  There is no such thing as physical separation in a grade school. 

That John Hopkins US county map is the best data source I've seen yet Alan.  Thanks for posting the link.

Noel

Years ago when my wife worked as a cashier at WalMart she was always down with something; coughing, sniffling, sneezing and the like.  It all went away after she quit.

Noel

30 minutes ago, birdguy said:

That John Hopkins US county map is the best data source I've seen yet Alan.  Thanks for posting the link.

Noel

You're most welcome.  I just started following it fairly recently.  This one (recommended by @MartinRex007) is really great for trend-spotting and has excellent explanations, but the Johns Hopkins one has a fantastic visual presentation and nothing beats it for a US drill-down.