I have had some questions about how to get numbers for modeling the course of the SARS-CoV-2 infections and buildup of immunity in the population. Today others were asking those questions on Twitter.
I am definitely not a statistician. The only things I know about statistics come from having a team of very capable statisticians working with me on environmental cleanups to tell me how to sample to determine how much needed to be cleaned up, and then how we could tell if things were properly cleaned up.
But I think I learned enough to ask reasonable questions and to suggest what might be priorities. I would greatly appreciate it if knowledgeable people would comment.
One of the great unknowns about Covid-19 is whether and how long an infected person is asymptomatic but may be spreading the virus. Some people may spread the virus for several days before symptoms appear. Some people may be infected and recover without ever showing symptoms. A further question is whether recovered people may spread the virus.
Most of the testing, however, is of people already showing symptoms, for good clinical reasons. Questions: Are there ways to use these results to project back to numbers of asymptomatic infected people? Is there a testing regime that would add to the available data that could give the numbers of asymptomatic infected people? Or are the two pretty much separate questions?
My sense is that the sampling doesn’t have to be totally random across the population. That’s in analogy to my experience in environmental cleanups: it was more important to sample where we knew contamination was likely to exist than broadly across an entire area. Iceland may be doing some work along these lines, as is the Seattle Flu Study and possibly South Korea and towns in Colorado and Italy.
It would also be extremely helpful to know, as the epidemic proceeds, the number of people who have become immune to the virus. There’s an additional unknown here: whether recovered people are immune and, if so, for how long. Many people become ill with something that has similar symptoms to Covid-19 but stay home, recover, and are not tested. Are they immune? If so, how many are there?
Finally, what I hope is a clarification. Once we know the numbers of asymptomatic infections, we would have a total number of infections. From that, an overall death rate could be calculated. To my mind, that’s an interesting number for an epidemiological overview maybe ten years from now. For now, it could even be dangerous in allowing Donald Trump to minimize the epidemic. The most relevant death rates now are the rate for symptomatic people and the rate for hospitalized people. Both of those can be used to estimate hospital needs.
I hope this helps some of those asking the questions and maybe attracts statisticians who can better frame the questions or even answer them.
Cross-posted to Nuclear Diner
Mr. Mack
According to my wife (who is plugged in there) there is a team of doctors/researchers at Vanderbilt working on a simple blood test to determine if the previously exposed are immune. No word on the progress. This may not have helped you, but it’s all I know.
Searcher
In summary, it’s bad, and it’s probably worse than you think. The best case scenario on the table for Italy, if they’ve arrested the spread (which looked promising the last two days and less so today), is something like 0.1% of their population dying from coronavirus.
JPL
I wish the MSM had spoken about Iceland, because it is possible to a symptomatic is shed the virus. The only way to stop it is shut it down. It was heartening to see the possibility of Italy being on the down curve
Cheryl, thank you so much for the post.
Brachiator
The number of “known” cases varies, and depends on how widespread testing might be.
The hard numbers we have are the number of people who have recovered from the virus, and the number of people who have died.
Not sure that we learn much about who is immune from the number of people who have recovered.
Roger Moore
@Mr. Mack:
Tests to see if someone has developed an immunity are apparently something that’s well developed and shouldn’t be too hard to put together now that we know what we’re targeting. There’s development time, but it should be bother shorter and more predictable than the development time for a vaccine.
JPL
The Atlanta mayor said that the ICU’s in all the hospitals are filled.
Apparently all the local news channels have trump on. All I heard was Easter is a very special time.
RSA
There’s an interesting direction you might suggest to your statistician colleagues, but it’s fraught with privacy pitfalls: cell phone location tracking to identify contacts and the spread of infection. That is, you work backward from known cases, and some individuals may pop out.
This seems like a ripe area for the application of statistical relational learning, though I know little more than the basics.
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/03/cellphone-tracking-could-help-stem-spread-coronavirus-privacy-price
Robert Sneddon
@Mr. Mack:
There seem to be a number of SARS-CoV-2 immune-reaction tests coming on to the market — the UK government has announced it is buying 3.5 million of them. They’re supposed to be quick, 15 minutes or so from sample to result and simple to operate, often resembling a pregnancy test stick. The question is what is the false-positive rate i.e. how many times will it WRONGLY report “yes you’ve had the coronavirus and you’ve developed enough immunity to not be at risk of catching it again or possibly pass it around to others”?
All medical tests have failures rates in both directions. A simple cheap test administered by non-professionals tends to have a high failure rate, it’s just the way things are. A test like this is not a magic bullet, it won’t stop the spread of the disease but it should make things better for more people in the later stages of the pandemic since it will give them confidence they can safely go about their business.
What would be really great is a simple test for incipient coronavirus infection, for people who might have just contracted the disease and be infectious but not yet symptomatic. That sort of test doesn’t seem to exist though (yet).
catclub
Just as a framework: Italy has on average about 2900(?) deaths per day based on life expectancy,
so 500 extra deaths per day is substantial
(I calculated it because I did not understand how CV-19 deaths were overwhelming the crematoria.)
The number for the US would be about 12000 per day. keep that in mind.
dm
Here’s a recent (21 March) release from the government of Iceland:
https://www.government.is/news/article/2020/03/15/Large-scale-testing-of-general-population-in-Iceland-underway/
A thing to know about Iceland is that it’s population is only about 365,000, so testing the entire population is doable (as of 21 March, they had tested about 10,000).
Mike in NC
@JPL: Call it “Fat Bastard’s Gaslight Hour (or Two)”
Searcher
@dm: In Stand Still, Stay Silent, Iceland is one of the remaining population centers in the world after the plague, for obvious reasons.
catclub
@RSA: Wasn’t that also part of China’s lockdown?
I am pretty sure South Korea used that for contact tracing.
Cheryl Rofer
@dm: Thank you!
catclub
@dm: Iceland and ireland both punch way above their weight when they are treated as nations. They have the populations ( and GDP) of small US states.
lamh36
This is a twitter thread I read last night:
And it got me wondering…It seems to me that Dem gov and officials, are the one mostly doing what should be done and taking this more seriously, even my own Dem gov and he’s over a red state. I mean you seem to have the occasional Repub gov who has to take it seriously now cause their state is a hotspot.
I hate to say it, but I suspect some of these Repub red state governors are hiding numbers behind the folks who at NOT being tested to make it seem like their Coronavirus numbers are low?
This especially had me thinking bout Texas after the Lt Gov say that bullshit last night about old folks sacrificing themselves.
So my question is, how can you get correct statitistics if not all the states are putting out “true” numbers?
In the same thread, who claims to be a trancriptionist saying they’ve seen an uptick in “flu-like symptoms, but non-flu, disease”
Cheryl Rofer
@lamh36: Yes, accuracy of death numbers is another big question.
TF79
Given the massive amounts of selection bias involved in the testing process I don’t think we can credibly infer much about immunity or asymptotic cases. Some form of randomized/population sampling, repeated across time would seem to be necessary.
RSA
@catclub: I believe you’re correct in both cases.
Roger Moore
@lamh36:
Getting true numbers when people are hiding them is hard. If the pandemic is as bad as it’s expected to be, you’ll be able to get reasonably accurate numbers by looking at the number of excess deaths. The raw excess death count may wind up being a bit fuzzy, since it will include people who didn’t have COVID-19 but who died because the medical system was too strained to save them, so you might have to filter for excess deaths from causes that look like COVID-19.
charluckles
Another reason I am so livid at the lack of preparation and botched testing. This will absolutely not be the last problem of this nature that we have to face. We should have been gathering every bit of data we could from the earliest moment possible.
Another Scott
Someone here, maybe you? maybe AL? pointed us to Tara Smith’s twitter feed:
That whole thread is worth a read.
Given the lack of testing, especially in the US until very recently, it’s hard for me to take anything reported about “asymptomatic” people as being universal. Maybe they were tested before they started showing symptoms. Maybe they were tested after they had mostly recovered. Dunno.
We need orders of magnitude more fast, inexpensive, and reliable tests to figure out the answers to your excellent questions. IMHO (I’m not an MD).
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
Raven Onthill
I believe Trevor Bedford (@tvrb on Twitter) at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle is doing some of this work. If you can reach him, he would be a good person to ask; he will know what is being done.
@lamh36: there is extensive surveillance of influenza-like illness by the CDC. See: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/#ILINet. The red line marked with triangles is the current year, and the third upward turn, starting around week 10 of this year, is probably COVID-19.
Mary G
A child under the age of 18 has died in Lancaster, CA. Unknown details beyond that.
Orange County, CA
Numbers from the Dept. of Health updated today
No deaths
152 cases (89 male, 63 female)
Age Groups:
<18: 1
18-49: 87
50-64: 41
>65: 23
As of today:
Total number of people tested by HCA Public Health Lab (PHL) and by commercial labs = 2,159
HCA PHL has kits available to test 1,390 specimens
(County population as of 2017: 3.19 million)
That seems like a lot more younger people, but testing has been and appears to still be so limited that I’m not sure any real conclusions can be drawn.
lamh36
@Raven Onthill: Oh, I know about the CDC’s flu effort and surveying, I work in the lab.
From the beginning of this when it first hit us, the protocol was to first screen for Flu and other respiratory viruses. Since it’s hit us really fully now, the criteria has changes and they no longer need to test for Flu first. If the patient has symptoms, a specimen is collected and they are sent to the state (who’s priority is healthcare workers and symptomatic patients) and the reference lab (who will test any appropriate specimen sent for testing).
At this point, we are suspecting the “natural” flu season is winding down (ex 300+ flu test in about 2 weeks, which is alot, but only 3-4 actual flu positives, when before we had much more positive a week), so now many of the cases are non-flu virus, and are being considered likely COVID-19 until state or reference lab testing results come back.
Fair Economist
@Mary G: NY also reported it hit people <65 first. I think that’s to be expected. At least initially, this is a disease of the mobile and interactive. Somebody under (traditional) retirement age is far more likely to be working with the public, taking trips, etc.
Fair Economist
@lamh36:
A high flu-like illness rate but only 1% are flu? That sounds really bad.
Van Buren
@lamh36: There is nothing new under the sun…Only a fraction of the “excess” deaths during the London Plague of 1666 were attributed to plague, but there was a sudden upsurge of deaths from consumption…
Another Scott
Relatedly, TheHill:
This thing is going to be with us a long time, but figuring out more about it – quickly – is important for reducing the impact.
Cheers,
Scott.
Robby-D
@Fair Economist: Don’t forget that a lot of flu negatives would be the common cold.
Chyron HR
@JPL:
That’s when Fat Fatty is going to stand outside a hospital screaming “THEY ARE NOT HERE! THEY ARE RISEN!”*
* I’m joking, of course. He wouldn’t know that reference.
Eunicecycle
@lamh36: I know in Ohio they are still not testing hardly anyone. My daughter is a nurse in a hospital and she had a coworker who was showing symptoms. It isn’t flu. The doctors wanted her tested but couldn’t get one for her. So she’s off work for at least 2 weeks (she feels okay so far) when if they could rule it out she could come back sooner. It’s just ridiculous, and I feel it has to be on purpose that testing is not widely available by now. Oh and it takes up to 5 days to get results.
lamh36
@Fair Economist: To be fair, other respiratory virus can cause some “flu-like” symptoms, but the testing for the more common ones aren’t “rapid” like the flu screen (not to get too into the weeds, but the flu screen is an EIA type test that can be resulted in 10 min once set up), the testing used to detect the presence of flu or other “common” respiratory viruses is usually a PCR test. But with PCR test, the result could be from an active or non-active infection. The flu screen is good for ACTIVE infections.
All that to say the patient may NOT have COVID-19 (a PCR test BTW), but it doesn’t mean they didn’t have a “flu-like virus”
Anyway, my lab is doing what they can to get a Respiratory PCR panel validated and correlated sooner rather than later, so that we can at the very least test the patient w/flu-like symptoms for the common viruses, its very rare to have a duel infection, i.e. having COVID-19 and flu or rhinovirus at the ame time and ya know survive.
Immanentize
@Chyron HR: he will instead bark:
“I am here! Rising is for losers!”
The Moar You Know
And it’s the most urgent question, because if they are not, we can kiss the days of people living past the age of forty goodbye.
Robby-D
First – I’m not an expert. So this is all musing:
Regarding whether asymptomatic people are infectious – the answer is likely yes, but that’s really the wrong question. The question should be how infectious are they, how does that vary with time, and what is the variance among individuals, and what is the curve (i.e. where do you find one standard deviation, two, etc.)
A person with no symptoms (yet?) but super-spreader attributes may be more infectious than a fully symptomatic patient. Maybe these lines cross at some point.
Conversely, symptoms often correlate with the disease wreaking havoc on cells, and fewer or no symptoms means the disease is being less damaging / the person is fighting it off better. No sore throat can mean fewer viruses replicating using cells in the throat. So in those cases, you can likely be assured the person is shedding fewer viruses, although again, we still don’t know if the individual is extremely effective at producing droplets via which those few viruses can spread widely.
Immanentize
@lamh36: Isn’t that the very thing that screwed up the initial CDC testing? Trying to make a better test for more things rather than just a good test for Covid? I salute the effort now, but that same idea left us vulnerable for a month.
Immanentize
@The Moar You Know:
Logan’s Run. Utopia!
Barbara
@Roger Moore: Let me give you my extraordinarily cynical response. I believe that part of the $2 trillion will include higher payments to hospitals that are caring for COVID-19 patients. They will see to it that those who are credibly infected are correctly identified. They might even overdo it, but let’s hope not.
Immanentize
@Robby-D: your musings noted. I think a more productive use of musing would be to find an old Penthouse and fap to that?
Barbara
@Immanentize: Making the feasible the enemy of the perfect sinks a lot of ambitious people and plans.
NotMax
@Immanentize
Now have On A Carousel stuck in the head.
;)
Immanentize
@Barbara: Fair enough. But no corporation bent on building the better and more lucrative mouse trap is going to pause because I pointed out an earlier tragic failure.
People are not so easily deterred or discouraged. See, NRA
Immanentize
@NotMax: You funny
PS. Whenever I hear the Hollies, my day is brighter. Mama’s and the Papa’s too.
lamh36
@Immanentize: the Respiratory test is NOT a new test. It’s been around for while in some form or another depending on the manufacturer. During respiratory virus season, the main virus looked for is Influenza. In contrast to Flu, the “common cold” can be caused by many different viruses. The Respiratory viurs PCR panel test for those viruses (21 is the most number of different targets I’ve seen depending on the manufacturer, including the 4 of the OG Coronovirus).
When the hospitals have ICU and entire floors w/patients waiting on Coronovirus results, have a Respiratory panel done that might show the patient has say Adenovirus or RSV could mean freeing up a bed for another ?COVID patient and less straing on healthcare providers
senyordave
I’m a numbers guy. I have looked at various projections for US cases, and the numbers all seem like worst case scenarios. I see CA and NY talking about 30% of the population being infected, which would be about 12 million for CA, and 6 million for NY. With a mortality rate of only 2% that would be 240k for CA and 120k for NY. Does anyone know if these 30% figures assume no steps are taken, or do they account for steps such as social distancing, business closures, etc.?
Fair Economist
@Robby-D: Yes, most flu tests are negative, and sometime almost none are positive – BUT – if you look at the CDC tracking, when there are very few positives there are very few tests. When flu-like illness is at near-epidemic levels, as it is now, normally 20-30% of flu tests are positive.
Gvg
@Roger Moore: if they die because the system was overwhelmed by COVID 19, in a sense, they WERE killed by it, even though they didn’t get it.
lamh36
@Fair Economist: right it’s just probabilities right? The more samples you test, the more likely you are to have positive results. I mean if you have 5/10 pos specimens, then testing 20 means you are likely to have 10/20 pos specimens.
So yep, 300 + test w/2-3 positives does not track from when we are truly knee deep in flu season, particurlay since we actually never averaged more than say 120 a week this past Flu season
Fair Economist
@senyordave: Cali figures predicting 58% (in our case) assume little is done. According to Governor Newsom, the state epidemiologists have calculated that with the current stay-at-home restrictions the state’s hospital capacity will never be overwhelmed, which means a lot less than 30% infected although I don’t know the exact numbers. More like 2-3% from my rough mental estimates.
Immanentize
@lamh36: What I am saying is that this is a reproduction if CDC’S initial coronovirus tests to be certified. It’s a good idea! Would be fabulous! Let’s hope you get it done!! Go!
But that CDC requirement that initial Covid test work like the one you are working on was a big factor in our country’s failure to bring this to heel quicker. This is why the US of A would NOT accept available WHO tests.
You disagree?
Barbara
@Immanentize: They could have started with the tests that had already been proven and then switched to the better ones when they were available. I don’t know but I would bet there is a contract somewhere in there that made them do what they did, not just because they failed and don’t want to talk about it, but because it is so inexplicable otherwise.
Brachiator
@senyordave:
When California Governor Newsom was speaking about possible cases, he explicitly noted that he was talking about a worst case scenario.
Fair Economist
@lamh36: One of the Cali hospitals reported that co-infection with COVID + other tested viruses is *not* rare, about 10%. I’ll try to find a link if you’re interested but it might be hard to find in the sea of info.
Immanentize
@Barbara: agreed. I bet Jared has a share. Burr too. In the corporations involved.
Bo
What I’m interested in knowing and I haven’t seen addressed is what exactly does a “positive” test result mean?
Does it mean that a sample contained a match of the SARS-CoV-2 RNA? Or that antibodies to the SARS-CoV-2 virus were detected?
Fair Economist
@Bo: Means RNA was found. Antibody tests are just becoming available now.
catclub
I heard the Terry gross interview with ? Brooks – who wrote World War Z
about emergency preparedness. once the cold war was won (ha!)
most of the stockpiles of stuff for nuclear war were left to rot – not updated. Also, FEMA decides to use Walmart’s supply chain as well.
the point was that maintaining those warehouses costs money.
Immanentize
@Fair Economist: Here is an interesting stat. Look not at Russian Covid cases, but the increase in pneumonia deaths.
Immanentize
@Fair Economist: I wrote a long comment about how this is a positive stat given we are at the end of flu season. But, I ate the comment somehow?
lamh36
@Immanentize: Right. Listne, I’ve gotten to the point where I’m done having arguments with folks about stuff I’ve been doing now for almost 20+ years on a practical day to day level.
I spend 8 hrs a day darn near every day with this stuff before and during this entire pandemic and I’ll be doing it afterward it’s controlled and over.
All I’m doing is giving some info on what MY daily experience with it all has been. That’s it, So hey, take what I say with a grain of salt if you must, but I’m not gonna try to defend or convince folks about what we are trying to do to control this with barely NO central message from what used to be one of the best public health apparatus ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Roger Moore
@Gvg:
But that doesn’t tell you how deadly the virus is; it tells you how deadly the collapse of the medical system is.
lamh36
@Fair Economist: Yes, please send that to me please. I’ll def share it with my colleagues.
As I said, hospitals are just trying to do the best they can with the resources they have. NO hosptial that I know of is doing in house COVID-19 testing yet. They are inudated w/patients that have flu-like symptoms and as of right now, I can ony tell you what’s going on here where I am.
The state lab is turning round test results a bit quicker than reference lab…but that’s more due to the state being a bit more exacting on the specimens that can be submitted and placing a priority on healthcare workers and symptomatic patients. But remember the state lab is doing the testing at no charge.
The reference labs are allowing pretty much anyone to submit a specimen but of course they are NOT doing it for free. Once this is over…you can believe the NEXT step is deciding WHO will pay for these PCR test that are being done by the reference lab. I can tell you, it’s likely to be a big fight between insurers and healthcare providers.
Fair Economist
@Immanentize: Depends on how they are doing the panel. If you have a bunch of lanes for separate tests, no problem. If you try to combine all the tests into one single “multiplex” PCR reaction, you can have a problem, although it can be done. I assume lamh36’s lab is doing it correctly.
Kent
I don’t know about other countries, but the numbers for the US are total garbage.
My wife is the regional COVID coordinator for Kaiser here in the Vancouver WA area (population roughly 500,000). They are doing most of their initial COVID screening via telephone consults and just telling everyone with classic COVID symptoms to self-quarantine and stay home unless/until they reach critical condition and need hospitalization. These are assumed incidences of COVID but they are not getting tested and confirmed because there is no point and they don’t have the tests or gear to test them.
They are also having elderly patients die of respiratory failure without ever having been tested either. She had two elderly patients die of respiratory failure/pneumonia in the past 24 hours that were not tested and won’t be.
So, total incidents and total deaths are likely way way low right now and as this progresses, will likely be increasingly underestimated. Perhaps that is the master strategy from the Federal government, who knows.
Basically all the are doing locally is testing health care workers. Mainly so they know who to send home and who to keep working even if they have mild flu symptoms.
Roger Moore
@Immanentize:
This is more or less what Trump was hoping for. He wanted to bury COVID-19 and hope that whatever deaths it caused would be attributed to knows diseases. Of course that doesn’t work when the death rate is much, much higher than usual.
Jay
Funny how a system that hails the “job creators” as gods, ( who have all buggered off to their Apocalypse bunkers), collapses in just two weeks when the workers stay home.
Immanentize
@lamh36: you think I am attacking you? Or your company? I am not. I salute you!
catclub
I would. technically he should stand outside a morgue to yell that.
Fat chance
Another Scott
@Immanentize: I can’t find it, of course, but there was some interview with Fauci a few weeks ago where he said it was common and routine for the US to develop its own infectious-disease tests rather than just use WHO’s. He didn’t really say why, as I recall, but at least the start of the process wasn’t that unusual.
Apparently.
It seems to me (I’m no expert and I have no inside knowledge) that a couple of things were going on. 1) For whatever reason, contamination?, the US-developed test had problems and gave unusable results. The problems weren’t resolved quickly enough. 2) Donnie’s minions broke all of the usual routine reporting and action systems at CDC and FDA so that when there was a problem the political appointees couldn’t do anything but argue with each other and make happy noises to Donnie. They had fired or silenced the experts on pandemics. Donnie didn’t want bad numbers, so they slow-walked approval for other testing that would show how bad the problem was.
I don’t think there was more than the usual grifting by Donnie’s people involved here. They can’t look 3 days ahead; there’s no way they’d be scheming about getting a piece of millions of test kits or PPEs – they still don’t understand how exponentials work!!
Grrr…
My $0.02.
Cheers,
Scott.
Roger Moore
@Jay:
One of the best comments I’ve seen about this is to compare how we treat workers and how we treat corporations. When a worker is living paycheck to paycheck and has serious financial problems within a couple of weeks of being laid off, we complain they spent too much on fancy coffee and avocado toast. When a corporation has so few reserves that it’s in financial trouble within a couple of weeks of a market hiccup, we bail them out.
NotMax
@catclub
Repeating from the other day.
New York City asked for 2.2 million N95 masks from the stockpile and received only 78,000, according to Health Department spokesman Michael Lanza. All of them were marked as expired. “Public health emergency preparedness, which includes the Strategic National Stockpile, has been chronically underfunded for years,” Lanza said.
In Oklahoma, the state Department of Health sent the Strategic National Stockpile a request on March 11 for supplies including 500,000 N95 masks, 300,000 face shields and 400,000 surgicals gowns. The state began receiving supplies five days later, but it has not gotten 90% of what it wants. “100% of all items were expired,” according to Department of Public Safety spokesperson Cody McDonell, although HHS sent them a letter saying that some of the masks had been performance-tested by the CDC and “they should be just fine to use.”
According to an HHS letter reviewed by ProPublica, most of the stockpile’s personal protective equipment was acquired in 2007 with supplemental funds for pandemic influenza preparedness “and many have exceeded their shelf life.” Even Florida, which got everything it wanted, received expired goods. Source
2007. Sitting on the shelf for a dozen years. They should be just fine. Or not. Maybe. Roll the dice and cross your gloved fingers they don’t come up craps.
Jay
NotMax
Formatting fix.
@catclub
Repeating from the other day.
2007. Sitting on the shelf for a dozen years. They should be just fine. Or not. Maybe. Roll the dice and cross your gloved fingers they don’t come up craps.
Jay
3 of 5 ICE Concentration Camp guards ( so far) have tested positive for Covid19. Results are not in for the other two.
patrick II
This isn’t what you were asking for, but as usual Kevin Drum brings his some statistics and chart skills to the covid-19 question. It is not heartening.
Immanentize
@Another Scott: But now? Three days ahead (days ago in fact) is state against state bidding wars for the most basic needs. Masks, gowns? I’ve got them, but give me a higher bid! Did you hear that Facebook came up with 3/4 million masks and Apple just ‘donated’ “millions” of masks. WHA?!
Maybe Donnie didn’t get in on the grift initially, but he is firmly there now. No price controls? Feeble anti-profiteering message from Barr? “We’ll come to your door” but not one product is yet listed on their profiteering list.
No, Scott, profit is the only goal now.
Jay
Bo
@Fair Economist:
Roger that.
Given that, then positive test results could be expected for individuals who are no longer infectious, depending on how long it takes for their body’s immune system to mop things up.
Jay
@Immanentize:
a bunch of Corporations ( the one I work for included), started stockpiling PPE after the Anthrax attacks. Because a bunch of people where I work use the full set of PPE daily, we have been able to cycle through it so that our stuff is relatively “fresh”. Anthrax, SARs, MERS, Ebola all caused panic buying/hoarding that reinforced Corporate policies.
For other Corporations, the stuff just sat in a warehouse waiting for the day it might be needed.
NotMax
@Jay
RSVP: Redneck Shitkicker Virus Party?
;)
Jay
joel hanes
@Immanentize:
Large Bay Area tech companies stockpiled masks in the wake of the Camp fire, because air quality got so bad for a while. It was a demonstration that a fire closer to the Bay could degrade the air so badly that employees would need masks, and so the companies duly bought maybe a week’s worth at 1 mask/employee/day.
Large Bay Area tech companies do lots of foresighted things.
Jay
Quelle Suprise!
Jay
Elizabelle
@Kent:
Do you know if anyone will ever take vials of blood or other samples to check, after the fact, for the virus?
Kent
@Elizabelle: I don’t have any idea. I expect that would be the coroner’s office or something. These were elderly patients who were on her regular primary care panel but were admitted to the hospital so out of her hands. The hospitalists and respiratory specialists take over care from there.
Lofgren
I personally know two people who have symptoms, but their doctors have not bothered to test them because they had close contact with somebody who had tested positive so it seems like a waste of a test given that they are very very likely infected. Do these two get counted in the official numbers?
unknown known
EDIT: Nevermind.
Kent
@Lofgren: No. And there are tens of thousands around the country who are just the same.
Bill Arnold
Piece (nature biotech article) on testing:
Fast, portable tests come online to curb coronavirus pandemic – Testing kits delivered by courier and digital tools combine to battle the COVID-19 outbreak. (Cormac Sheridan, 23 March 2020)
Includes a 1/2 dozen antibodies tests.
terry chay
@lamh36: China held back the numbers too until they didn’t. However after a while their numbers did align with the WHO investigation.
Russia and Iran are holding back numbers. We can infer that from the data. Eventually those will align also Indonesia held back numbers and now a week after their first reported case they are looking like Italy.
Eventually the numbers will catch up and can’t be hidden.
Robby-D
@Immanentize: wtf? My musings added a lot more to this conversation than your moronic meanderings and mumblings, your rudeness is neither appreciated nor appropriate.