I posted these questions in the May coronavirus thread about a month ago. While I want to know all the answers NOW, far from being frustrated by the slow pace of science, I’m amazed by the fast pace. We still don’t know the answers to these questions, but we’re coming closer. I’ll annotate with what we seem to know now.
We don’t know the IFR for each age group. The consensus for the overall IFR is somewhere between 0.5% and 1%.
We’ve now had some seroprevalence results for the US. Looks like greater than 20% in New York City, less than 5% in most other parts of the US. We’re nowhere close to herd immunity.
Not much new here.
Looks like younger kids get infected, but do not infect adults much. As we open up camps and daycare, stay tuned.
So far no convincing evidence.
I would so like to know the answer to this. I’ve seen nothing new. Some people are still reporting deficits two months after infection. No idea how many, or how long those deficits will persist.
Between 20% and 80%. Sooo…
More suggestive evidence that cloth masks work, and they work by preventing/slowing the wearer from infecting others.
Most infections happen at superspreading events. Superspreading is most likely in conditions of the three Cs: Closed spaces with poor ventilation, Crowded places with many people nearby, Close-contact settings such as close conversations
Pretty hard? At least, we’re not seeing a lot of transmission outside.
Don’t know. We aren’t seeing evidence of this happening in great amounts.
I’ve got nothin’.
Three Cs. Loud places seem to be a lot worse than quiet places, too.
Hopefully, this will finally put this drug’s use to rest.
“The first carefully controlled trial of hydroxychloroquine given to people exposed to the coronavirus did not show any benefit.”
“There was no meaningful difference between the placebo group and those who took the drug. Among those taking hydroxychloroquine, 49 of 414, or 11.8 percent, became ill. In the placebo group, 58 or 407, or 14.3 percent, became ill. Analyzed statistically, the difference between those rates was not significant.”
“The drug also did not make the illness any less severe.”
“Side effects like nausea from hydroxychloroquine were more common than from placebos, 40.1 percent compared with 16.8 percent, but there were no problems with heart rhythm or any other serious adverse effects.”
“Infectious disease experts who were not part of the study said it was well done and answered an important question, though the results were disappointing.”
The more interesting part of that story comes from the bottom. I’ll give you the Guardian version:
"Governments and WHO changed Covid-19 policy based on suspect data from tiny US company
The World Health Organization and a number of national governments have changed their Covid-19 policies and treatments on the basis of flawed data from a little-known US healthcare analytics company, also calling into question the integrity of key studies published in some of the world’s most prestigious medical journals.
A Guardian investigation can reveal the US-based company Surgisphere, whose handful of employees appear to include a science fiction writer and an adult-content model, has provided data for multiple studies on Covid-19 co-authored by its chief executive, but has so far failed to adequately explain its data or methodology.
…"
That scary hydroxychloroquine study in The Lancet and New England Journal of Medicine that everyone in the media was writing about a few weeks ago used underlying data that was likely faked.
The study referenced in the article I posted has nothing to do with the study published in The Lancet and NEJM. This study noted they did not find adverse effect from the drug - just that it doesn’t work in treating CV-19.
I’d rather scientist spend their time working on finding treatments that work on treating CV-19 patients.
Why would you not trust anything coming out of China? That seems like an overreaction to the fact that you can’t trust everything that comes out of China. China did test most of Wuhan, about 10 million people. That’s well documented and is being reported in news agencies such as Rueters.
The point of the article from Reuters was this, ‘After testing 9.9 million of 11 million people in a vast testing campaign that began on May 14, the Chinese city of Wuhan, where the coronavirus outbreak began, has found no new cases of people suffering from the disease and 300 asymptomatic carriers of the virus.’ That means Wuhan has been very successful at controlling the virus.
I wish they had done antibody testing and could tell us what % of Wuhan have the antibodies. That would be interesting to know.
This is also interesting from the Reuters article and something I didn’t know, ‘China does not count people who are infected with the virus but do not show symptoms of the disease as confirmed cases.’
It would be very startling indeed if that’s what the study found. However that was not the result.
It found that 10% of diabetics who were hospitalized died within a week. That’s but nothing like what @TatinG said. People who are hospitalized for covid are very sick, and many die. This study took place in France in March, at a time when doctors knew less about how to treat covid patients than they know now.
“The risk factors for severe form of COVID-19 [in patients with diabetes] are identical to those found in the general population: age and BMI [weight],” the researchers concluded.
I think that’s very strange to not listen to anything from Chinese news. This isn’t even Chinese news. This is reported by western media. i think Reuters is highly reputable. There is video of the testing happening. I have read things in Chinese media on occasion for about 30 years. I can’t dismiss all of Chinese media as BS. That’s simply untrue. There is certainly gov control that happens at times but that does not make all news out of China false. I think you would have had to read some Chinese news and compare it to what you see from other countries to see this is true, that not all news out of China is being impacted by their government in how it is reported. I think it would be very unfortunate to dismiss it all now. At least doctors the world over, including in China, collaborate and share information with one another and work together. That’s very important right now.
But then how do you tell the difference between an asymptomatic carrier (not contagious according to the above claims) and a presymptomatic carrier (most contagious a few days before symptoms show)?
I am wondering the same thing and wonder if it is a matter of slightly different definitions of things? If they have found asymptomatic spread is actually not a thing, counter to what we have been told here, then that’s very interesting and very confusing as well. They obviously have controlled the spread very well, whatever the case. I wonder if what was thought of as asymptomatic spread was more airborne spread happening?
I feel like there are many such things in the case of Covid where we hear one thing is the case and later hear the opposite. I am sure in the future scientists will know these things and so much more than they do now. It will be interesting to learn more as time goes by.
Yeah, I read the article you linked too and found the bottom half of page fascinating, so I thought I would share.
Someone (including a a science fiction writer and an adult-content model,) faked data on Hydroxychloroquin and got the results published in some of the permanent medical journals in the world, causing numerous studies on the drug to shut down, which amazes me.
It wasn’t meant as a direct response to your post.
‘There is no definitive answer yet on the level of risk posed by asymptomatic cases, with anecdotal evidence and studies to date producing conflicting answers.’
From AP article on Wuhan testing 10 million people in 19 days. https://apnews.com/70fd3d4ecbb5882ca0ddd50f4f7532ca
Also,
‘The rapid testing of so many people was made possible in part through batch testing, in which samples from up to five people are mixed together, Xinhua reported. If the result is positive, then the people are individually tested.’
Boxcar, that’s a wild article!! I am very curious how such a thing could happen. It took the Dutch group months to get published in Nature and they are still not getting much press about their treatment for Covid they had at the beginning of March. I thought it was very hard to get published in peer review.
@suteiki77 - I stand by my words. Anything coming out of China (as in country of, meaning official announcements and PR) is by definition suspicious and should be treated as not believable until confirmed by a reputable independent source.
That said, a peer reviewed article published by a Chinese team in an international journal - sure, that should be treated as reliable information (unless it gets retracted).
We had relatives suggesting dubious treatments for my dad’s serious issues, including a yeast infection in his sternum and fluid collecting around his lungs. I did find one journal article that suggested some of the relatives’ thoughts had merit. I showed it to my dad’s infectious disease doctor (one of the leading guys in Austin). He rolled his eyes and said, “That’s a journal out of China. You can’t trust it. I’ve never heard of those treatments.” So we told our relatives to back off (it took a couple of lectures from us, sigh!).
The ironic thing is that my dad started improving GREATLY about that time (he will soon be kicked out of hospice). If we had tried those alternative treatments, the relatives would have been crowing about how they worked.