New York and USC Study Shows Many People With Covid Antibodies

I read that there are other studies that may be flawed. For instance, a Santa Clara County study was done, but the test group was not randomly chosen, so the bias was toward people wondering if they had Covid 19.

That's why I chose these two studies. I think they're the best out there.

One other thing I want everyone to consider. The New York City result shows 21.2% have the antibody. Why so high? Because people are stacked on top of each other, they share their free space (ever eat at a corner pizza place in NYC) and they use public transportation. The virus would've spread much faster in that environment.

Compared to Los Angeles (a car culture), we don't walk much, most of us don't take public transportation and we don't have sliced pizza places on the corner (I wish we did!). We don't rub shoulders with each other - we enjoy our free space. So a 4.1% contagion rate seems very likely and makes much more sense vs the official figures of 0.17%.

These figures make a lot more sense to me. If they're proven to be correct, I think we can breath a sigh of relief, knowing that it's not as deadly as we thought.

I was just thinking about Wuhan. People are stacked on top of each other, similar to NYC, but maybe even worse. When they shut down Wuhan, the number of hospitalizations rose quickly along with the mortality rate. Then, all of a sudden, it disappeared. We were so suspicious that we said that China is cheating and they're not telling us the whole story.

Maybe they were being honest. Follow me on this for a minute.

In a normal virus epidemic, the number of cases rises quickly. Then an event occurs - warm weather for the flu. And all of a sudden, it goes away. Maybe, just maybe, it doesn't really go away. Maybe a large number of people get the virus, but fight it off and they are asymptomatic or have very little symptoms. We don't include them in the number of cases. Then we think it goes away, when in reality, a high enough portion of the population has the antibody and the virus can't do any more damage, so it goes away until the next "flu season". Our immune system may not have a permanent "fix", so when the body feels it's no longer a threat, it releases the antibody or alters it so it can be used to fight something else.

I am not an immunologist, so this is just my thinking. If someone has some expertise, it would be great to hear from you.

"The mortality rate of Covid 19 is no different than the normal flu."

Your are kidding right?

The reality is probably somewhere in the middle.

One doctor quipped that Covid-19 has probably seen a lot more of us than we have seen of it.

Asymptomatic people simply are not going to 'counted' for the foreseeable future.

It could actually be true.

If a large percentage of the population tests positive for the antibody, the denominator will certainly drop.

I'm not sure how many people they tested on the US Aircraft Carrier, but the percentage of positives with zero symptoms was north of 60%, and some studies say north of 80%.

I didn't see the info on the US Aircraft Carrier, but it makes sense to me.

My sister is an Acupuncture doctor and an Herbologist. She's told me a lot of things about how our bodies function and in recent conversations with her, I've learned about our immune systems. I hope I don't blotch this up too badly!

We have a natural protector - our immune system. When we're exposed to "things" like a virus, bacteria, toxin, our immune system goes to work to fight it. We don't want to overexpose ourselves, but we also don't want to incubate either. When we incubate, our immune system isn't needed and it hibernates. When we're out of incubation, our immune system isn't ready and it becomes overwhelmed. When I'm strong and healthy, my immune system is fighting off invaders. I am asymptomatic.

Younger adults typically have a strong immune system. I'm going to assume that the men and women in our military are also young and have strong immune systems. So if a virus hits an aircraft carrier, there's a good chance it won't have much effect.

No joke. There are a lot of people who are asymptomatic. If you want the true mortality rate, you need to account for these people. The problem is how do we find this data?

And in reality, I do believe the mortality rate is higher than a normal flu. It's nowhere near 2-4%, like the media is scaring people with.

Here in CA, the scared people are petrified! They believe that 2-4 out of 100 die; the media has done such a job on them.

So far in CA, the mortality rate is very low. If we factor out the people with pre-existing conditions, the rate is very, very low.

In other places in the world, it's much higher. I'm not sure what the connection is. Maybe the amount of sunlight? CA has a lot of sunlight.

The concept of "truth" in my response #4 refers to the reports of the study being sufficiently "the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth" that the typical consumer of the media product is better equipped to make a wise decision in this virus endangered world.

I suspect that the written words are true but I fear that the understanding the reader gets is not. I fear that the people who were tested are the people who think that they were infected and recovered without hospitalization. That is far from representing the random population. Thus, the math may be correct but the conclusion might be way off.

Here in LA, we have SENSATIONAL news! NEWS FLASH - WILDFIRES RAVAGE MULTIMILLION DOLLAR MALIBU HOMES (reporter with face shield and mask doing a live video in front of one house on fire, with sirens blaring and lights flashing) The reality - The hills are burning, but the fire department is doing their best and a total of 4 homes have been lost to the fire.

I've talked to quite a few people who believe the Corona Virus is alive and we have to kill it! They believe it's not a flu, but a virus! No, no, no! It's smart and acts like a flu, but when you get it, it's a DEADLY VIRUS, NOT A FLU!

I'm not sure why there are so many people who make little to no effort to educate themselves.

I've talked to quite a few people who believe the Corona Virus is alive and we have to kill it!

i saw the movie,... it didn’t come from Wuhan,... it came from space. And yes, we killed it...

Was it with a laser beam. One of those super cool green ones - the virus killer laser!

i suspect it would have to be a nearly invisible ultraviolet as SolarEagle has pointed out in other threads. Imagine the effect on a person when they can hardly see the laser beam but the fluorescence it causes on so many surfaces it touches would be a multi-color confusion.

Back in the late 80's, my sister was visiting from Chicago and she got tickets to a taping of some rock music tv show. Steppenwolf was the headliner - I think they were high on something and they kept screwing up the song. The show was actually taping them, but they couldn't get it right. Cut, cut, cut!!!!

I was standing near the Leslie spinning speaker thing. I got tired of hearing the same thing over and over!

Or, just crank the power up and have the laser burn things - Wow, that's such a strong laser. I guess you need something that strong to kill the Corona Virus. I'm glad we have such a powerful laser.

No,...the crashed the space station into the atmosphere...

Ummm. That movie was from 1968. I know it's a documentary, but how did the Corona Virus hide for 52 years? Was it the communist Chinese government who hid it? Or did they send it back into space so that it would return in 2020. Like the Planet of the Apes?

Do you know when the Planet of the Apes spaceship is suppose to come back to earth? I wonder if it'll bring a living virus that's even smarter than Covid 19?

I share your disdain for the media. However, you have to give them one thing. They are excellent at predicting what will be unavailable at the store. Whatever they predict, sure enough, it's gone from the shelves a week later.

I'm one of those who believe that the egg came before the chicken!

This is the sad thing about Corona Virus. The media has their agenda and they're doing one heck of a job telling a one sided story.

Do I believe that there are a lot of people who are asymptomatic? Yes. I base this on some common sense. If this is such a highly communicable virus, then how does it stop so quickly in places where it's an epidemic? It should continue to spread until some critical mass number is hit - it hasn't happened anywhere there's been a breakout. Why? Because a large part of the population isn't affected.

There's also a chance that the two tests are politically inclined and they were done to make people feel better about the opening of the economy. Maybe? But the data will tell us after the economy reopens.

In the state of Georgia, it looks like data is pointing to the asymptomatic argument - they've opened the economy and cases are still on the decline. https://dph.georgia.gov/covid-19-daily-status-report

Shhhhh . . . . don't ruin a good story with good news and common sense.

Today I saw & heard a doctor talking to the news media. He said the antibody test could be positive if you have had the common cold recently. A news person also said the cost is $94 and in Colorado you get it by going to a certain hospital in Denver. That's a "no way" for me. I also believe I had it in late January or early February. The cough took more than a month to get over.

"A New York state study shows that 21.2% of New York City residents have the Covic 19 antibody"

21% of New Yorkers have not been tested for the virus let alone the antibody. BS meter in the red.

I think there is a lot of science that is being 'winged' these days by these talking-head pundits on the boob tube. They're just making their best guesses too based on incomplete data. But that's all anyone can do at this point.

Somebody knows something that isn't being shared with us. I'm thinking it's either medical or economic. My guess it could be both. A few facts:

1. You see very few in the WH wearing masks. If it's so contagious and dangerous, wouldn't protecting a older POTUS be important?

2. Kudlow said that we won't have to shut down if we get a second wave (he said it this past weekend). He based it on us knowing so much about the CV now.

3. Unemployment is thru the roof! We need it to fall nearly as fast, but it can't be done if the country is closed.

4. $9T of government money has been spent/allocated on CV. The $10T number that was thrown around a month or so ago is too low. Notice how THEY are being more cautious about new stimulus packages.

Think about it.

I believe THEY have been using SA for a while and the results don't look good (for the economy). That may be why the big push to get back to work.

Though the original concept of closing the economy was to flatten the curve. We've flattened it and as long as we can keep it flat, we're doing what we need to.

Or, we can just destroy the country financially - didn't some terrorist say something about this?

Please read the article. It doesn't say that 21.2% of New York City residents were tested.

A sample of the population was tested and 21.2% of that sample tested positive to the antibody.

There are lots of test kits available for sale in the US. NONE have FDA approval. The companies are making claims about the specificity of their test which are at best suspect and at worst just plain wrong. In one case the assay study carried out by the manufacturer to verify the effectiveness of the test was carried out with just 54 samples. It identified only 45% of those who had antibodies and claimed that there were no false positives, i.e it had not mis-identified any other illness as Covid. A 99% specificity will throw up about 16% false positives, at 95% specificity this rises to 50%.

The study quoted was a pre release paper not peer reviewed. Why release at that point? I suspect that if it had gone to peer review it would have been thrown out and never published. Trump has genuine grounds for claiming "false news" when this type of data is released, but as it supports his agenda that is unlikely to happen in this case.

Just remember that after the SARS epidemic a number of years ago, researchers identified about 40 various corona-type viruses, including the one that produced SARS. Since then hundreds more have been identified. Warnings given then were generally ignored, so research to find medicines or other ways to combat a similar epidemic was generally not pursued (this was all discussed in a previous forum).

Also remember that the antibody tests are not currently specific for only the Covid 19 virus, but also will give positive tests or marginally positive tests for other corona-type viruses. So a positive test, although indicative and probably correct, still cannot give a trusted answer. This is a partial reason why people who test positive still get Covid 19.

Generally to achieve "herd immunity", for viral infections such as measles, the necessary percent of immune people has to be over 90%. We are a very LONG WAY from achieving this. So, relaxation of the various social distancing and preventive ways of reducing the transmission of the disease can easily be followed by a second (or a third, or even a fourth) wave of infections.

In 6-12 months we will know a whole lot more than we do now, but educated guesses and (sometimes) wild-a$$ guesses are worth considering. Reputable studies must follow very rigorous protocols to eliminate or control for sampling errors, sampling bias, and many other potential problems that can render the study meaningless. Doing this is not easy and usually takes more time than we currently want to spend.

JMM

I heard something interesting over the weekend. Larry Kudlow said that we will not close down the country again if we get a 2nd wave. We know much more about CV vs when the decision was made to shut us down.

Economists are saying that the sooner we get back to normal, the better chance of having a strong rebound in employment. If we take too long, companies will shut down and the rebound will be weaker.

I will be watching the results of Georgia's actions. I have seen that some of the business opening are taking seriously recommendations for social distancing---Good! But the opportunities for viral transmission are going to increase substantially. If the Georgia curve is unaffected in the next 5-14 days it will be a good sign. If the curve turns up significantly we will have established by trial what we could have believed based on modeling. Unfortunate for those affected.

https://www.ajc.com/news/coronavirus-georgia-covid-dashboard/IjORDGLckdP3RI9hJU5CWO/

Hello,

Just wondering whether there is a similar graph showing the new cases as a percentage of the "not yet diagnosed/affected" population. Since if 20% have been infected, then the "available to be infected" population is reduced each day.

Well you have about 23k confirmed cases, don't know how accurate that is...the population of Georgia is about 4 million people....so if we make a guess of 200k people exposed 23k showing symptoms and the rest asymptomatic, then we can say 1/20 of the population is infected or 5%...with about 900 deaths over the course of 5 weeks...

That graph shows a weekly cycle. Wassat?

It's still trending down. https://dph.georgia.gov/covid-19-daily-status-report

Looks like an extended plateau...

It started coming down, then went back up. Looks like its just extending out.

What I remember is that the reason for stay at home orders was to flatten the curve, so the medical community isn't overwhelmed. The "extended plateau" is the flat area - they didn't get a spike, which was the goal. If the cases don't spike up, which is the fear, then they're meeting their goal.

At sometime, the media changed the goal from keeping the medical community from being overwhelmed to saving lives. I understand that nobody wants to unnecessarily put their life at risk, but in a normal day, we do. Granted, the risk is very, very, very small, but we do. Cooking breakfast in the morning, driving to work, something happening at work, going to lunch, driving home, cooking dinner, taking the dog for a walk ...

There are times in our lives when our risk is higher than others. It's been 26 years since we had a big earthquake here. The mountains a few blocks behind me haven't burned in a long time (there's lots of fuel, ready to go). Real risks that I live with. Yet I choose to live here, because the good far out weighs the bad. And these last months, we have a new risk. Though I'm not too concerned, because I think we've had CV in our house and even if not, I'm pretty healthy (ditto for the misses) so I don't think it would be that bad.

haha...You sound like the proverbial frog relaxing in his little pool of water as it slowly heats....

Another thought just came to mind. Here's what I see from the chart you provided.

1. The cases seemed like they were ready to spike around the time of the stay at home order. So that was a good thing.

2. During the stay at home order, the moving average trickled down, but only slightly.

3. With a 14 day incubation and a stay at home order, how were there so many new daily cases after 14 days?

4. The day after the stay at home was lifted, there was a large spike. Was it due to more people being tested, because they felt they needed to be tested because the ban was lifted?

5. If we look at the original "flatten the curve" graphs, the GA data looks like it's a model case. The only problem is that the flattened area will have a very long run, before it heads down.

There is a problem with testing for something that is relatively rare. For example, suppose the infection rate of Covid-19 is 1%. You have a test that is 95% accurate, meaning that 5% of the people that are infected will test negative (false negative) and 5% of the people that are not infected will test positive.

If you test 10,000 people, 1% or 100 are infected. Of these 95 will test positive and 5 will test negative. 9900 people are not infected. Of these, 95% x 9900 = 9405 will test negative and 495 will test positive.

Suppose you test positive. What is the chance that you are infected? Of the 10000 tested, there are a total of 495+95 = 580 that tested positive, of which only 95 are infected. Your odds of being infected is 95/580 = 16%.

When the number infected is low, the false positive of the majority not infected overwhelms the true positives of the infected.

Here are some plots showing the interaction of test accuracy and, in this case, the actual Covid-19 infection rate. There are two effects of lower accuracy tests, an apparent infection rate higher than actual, and a lower probability an individual positive test is actually positive. For a low infection rate, the test must be highly accurate for good results. (Assumed here is that test accuracy is the same for false positives and false negatives.)

Equations:

True Positive = accuracy x infection rate

False Negative = (1 - accuracy) x infection rate

True Negative = accuracy x (1 - infection rate)

False Negative = (1 - accuracy) x (1 - infection rate)

Test accuracy is plotted for 90%, 95%, and 99%

Infection rate is plotted from 0 to 20%

Bottom line: If the test is 90% accurate, the infection rate may appear higher than it actually is, and if you receive a positive test, chances are good that it is actually negative.

There must be a number of times someone can be tested to then make the test results accurate....Maybe we should just test people 10 times each and have some clarity...

That's a good point. Multiple tests, if you have the luxury of multiple test kits, should increase accuracy, provided that the inaccuracy is random and not due to the patient. And there are random factors...

"No test is 100% accurate. Although tests can perform well in ideal laboratory conditions, in real life lots of other factors affect accuracy including the timing of the test, how the swab was taken, and the handling of the specimen."

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/04/coronavirus-covid19-tests-pandemic-virus-antibodies-swab-blood/

In #19 the analysis addressed separating the infected from the general population. The flip side of the coin, which doctors face, is removing "recovered" patients from the COVID-19 ward, where the rate of infection rate is close to 100%. The same math applies to removing recovered patients from a majority of infected as removing infected individuals from a population of non-infected.

Standard procedure is to isolate infectious patients...So I'm thinking 3 separate tests from different locations at different times and the majority rules...This should put us well into the 99% bracket...

Good analysis. Thanks for sharing!

A thought about 95% accuracy. If a test is 95% accurate, doesn't it mean that 95% of the results are correct and reliable and 5% are incorrect or unreliable (either false positive or false negative)? The last stats class I took was back around 1990 and I think this is correct.

It means that 95.9% in Los Angeles don't, and 78.8% in New York don't, meaning that just under 1.05e7 people, representing just 0.13% of the current global population estimate, are still at risk in those two areas combined, according to their 2018 census data in Wikipedia.

One waits for better <...news...>.

There will be arguments over the numbers for years to come.

And people will cherry pick the data that best supports their hypothesis, as they always have. It's hard to find people without a horse in the race.

Over the weekend, I heard that deaths from heart disease has dropped in 2020. A few logical explanations are below:

1. Corona Virus is good for people with heart disease. It helps them survive a heart attack, stroke, clogged arteries, etc.

2. Corona Virus has no effect on people with heart disease except that people have less stress and aren't experiencing as many heart related problems.

3. Corona Virus is being blamed as the cause of death for people who die of heart disease. It could be a factor in accelerating a heart attack or stroke - extra stress on the body. Or, it may be more convenient to blame CV for the death. Some have said that hospitals get more money if it's a CV death.

I haven't looked into it. I find the correlation amusing. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-05-hospitals-heart-covid-.html

I think the LA study was for LA County, not the city proper. There are 10M people in LA County, so the numbers are a bit different than what you calculated, but the gist of the message is understood.

If the study is fairly accurate, the studies provide very good news.

From what I’ve heard, people what to force hotels to house the homeless. From the sounds of their reasoning, is because the rooms are empty anyways.

is that true?

It's already been approved and the sick homeless people are now staying in hotel/motel rooms across LA.

With CV, the travel industry has been crushed. With so many empty beds, THEY decided to pay hotel/motel owners for the use of rooms. These room are homeless people who are not sick - a stay at home place for them to live.

A friend of mine is a maintenance worker at a hotel. He told me that his company refused to let homeless into their rooms. This is the hotel where he works: https://www.langhamhotels.com/en/the-langham/pasadena/?htl=tllax&src=organic&eng=google&size=na&cid=yext_profile&htl=tllax&src=organic&eng=google&size=na&cid=yext_profile It's one of the nicest hotels in town - I wouldn't want to stay in a room where homeless were sheltered. There's a bed bug problem in LA and they're very hard to get rid of. One of my tenants had bed bugs and I had a lot of trouble getting rid of the bugs!

I’m curious,... I’ve heard that the military will not accept an volunteers that had tested positive for coronavirus that was put on a ventilator and recovered.

1. what damage if any does the CoronaVirus cause for asymmetric people that weren’t treated and recovered?
2. what damage does the ventilator cause for people that are treated for the coronavirus?

Wow, that's interesting.

A friend of ours is a RN who worked ICU for many years. We were discussing CV and why people on ventilators had such a low recovery rate.

In general, ventilators are not recommended unless there's no alternative. She said that many people have lung damage from being on a ventilator. Pneumonia is common and since the patient has a weak immune system, they blast them with antibiotics. As a layman, it sounded very negative to me - sort of what's used as a last ditch effort. I think with CV causing trauma to the lungs, compounding this with the damage a ventilator can do, it doesn't sound like a good combination ... unless there's no alternative.

My guess is that the military doesn't want to accept someone with a damaged lung.

On earlier posts that SE was doing... ventilators if not constantly monitored can do damage and explained how. That must be permanent.

interesting, the hotter heads were complaining when this first started was, was crying about nothing was available. And not having ventilators available, was good for them.

another case where ‘let cooler heads prevail’.

Much of the CV response could've used the "cooler heads prevail" attitude.

I got a good laugh at one of the loud ones at his press conference 7-8 weeks ago. It was early (in the CV pandemic) and he was sitting in a chair behind a fold up table with stacks of boxes behind him (supplies). He was crying about not being given enough supplies, yet he had the gall to sit in front of boxes full of stuff!

His PR guy must've been asleep!

I get a lot of blow back,... that I’m cold hearted, when I’m just saying what the situation is, what else could I do...
All the panic spots are already taken... I suppose I could have offer them a tissue... but of course, They’re already in a twist that they’d take that the wrong way also...

tissue?...