This is a substantial mischaracterization of what New York State is actually saying.
By the end of March, the official diagnosed number of cases in New York was just under 200,000. This study says that the actual number of infected people was about 2 million.
But the 200,000 was not anyone’s “virus infection estimate.” Nobody thought that every single person who had covid at that time had had a test and tested positive. There was widespread understanding, including among posters here, some of whom lived in New York and thought they or their relatives had covid, that there were many infected people who couldn’t get tested.
At that time I, and many other people, were reading stories in the media about sick people showing up at emergency rooms, then having doctors tell them “We know you have covid. Go home and isolate,” without any tests.
It’s preposterous to maintain that anybody who was paying attention, let alone New York State Department of Health employees, thought at the end of March, everyone who was infected had been tested. It’s absurd.
@roycroftmom – What @“Cardinal Fang” is saying is not “defeatist”. It is countering your constant drumbeat of “blame the victim”. You’re being incredibly deliberately disingenuous to pretend your comments are helpful suggestions, when really they feel more like a game of whack-a-mole inserted into an actual conversation. Suffice to say that CF has a much better grasp of the realities of my world than you do, so her discussion reflects our realities, and yours does not.
Then I hope you are coming up with better suggestions than mine for your own world, @Garland. I was merely forwarding techniques I saw work in other places, feel free to ignore if they wouldnt work for you. But you are truly naive if you think anyone from outside NY is coming to save you next time or that you will get different results. NYC has lots of talent and nearly obscene wealth, so I suggest you start putting it to use on this issue.
@roycroftmom, if you’re interested in techniques that work in other dense places with large public transportation sectors, I suggest you turn your attention to Seoul and Tokyo, two cities with enormous subway systems. They have contained coronavirus with masks, testing, tracing and isolation.
New York metro areas would do well to require masks on public transportation, and also encourage patrons not to talk. Talking in close quarters spreads the disease. By culture, Japanese people don’t talk on subways and trains.
It says nothing about the New York State Department of Health believing as of April 1, that they had tested and identified all the cases of covid. I assume that’s because the Department of Health believed no such thing.
Alders in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, one of the areas visited by a lot of tourists in the past few weeks, voted down a proposal to require wearing of masks downtown when physical distancing is not possible.
I am participating in this thread, not moderating it. I posted that I do not trust studies from obscure groups in Mexico. I would appreciate it if people stuck to peer reviewed studies. It’s not a TOS requirement. But non peer reviewed articles don’t count for much when you’re trying to prove a point.
The study referred to in the CNN article says that confirmed positive cases represented about a tenth of all positive cases.
It’s good that New York did the study and they should. The result confirms what a lot of people already thought, that there were about ten times as many cases as there were confirmed positives. This is no big surprise.
We can do a back of the envelope calculation of infection fatality rate (IFR). Using the estimated cases as of March 31, about 2 million, and the reported deaths as of April 15, about 15,000 (on the assumption that it takes a while to die once infected), we get an infection fatality rate of 0.75%. (If we use deaths as of April 10, we get an IFR of 0.5%.) I agree with @OneMoreToGo2021 that at that point, we should expect a higher IFR in New York than in a place where the hospitals weren’t overwhelmed. But an IFR of 0.75% or even 0.5% makes the claimed estimate of 0.25% nationwide look too low.
There’s also the question of what a claimed nationwide IFR should mean. New York deaths are still more than a quarter of all US deaths. If nationwide IFR means the fatality rate as it actually happened, you can’t ignore a quarter of the deaths. You can’t say 20,000 people in New York shouldn’t have died, so we’re going to not count them in our statistics. They did die.
I just picked up sandwiches from our local variety store. The employees and I were the only people wearing masks. None of the other customers were. I was shocked.
Oh, I thought it was based on the fatality rates being reported in countries all around the world and from WHO and CDC, that established it was more lethal than the flu for those over 50 but less lethal than the flu for those under 25, @emilybee
Just participated in a very long group text exchange with former coworkers, most who are middle-aged professional restaurant servers.
One night of outdoor dining in Illinois and there is widespread despair from the servers.
One place, where a few from the text chain work, have the following rules for the patio:
-Only the server may approach the table when guests are present. The food runners can run the food to the patio, and hand it to the server, and then the server must bring it to the guests at the table. The bus boys cannot clear plates or glasses during service, only the server can. The bus boys may clear the table and re-set it only after the guests have left.
-Masks must be worn at all times. Disposable gloves must be worn at all times, and changed after each visit to a table. The glove thing is 100% impractical.
-No presenting a check in a check presenter “book”. Just the printed receipt. No cash. Credit cards only. The staff will not get their tips nightly, but every two weeks on their paycheck.
These new arrangements are near-deal breakers. They are reporting that the tip share % has not changed, but the management has increased the difficulty exponentially for the servers.
Boy, it was REALLY hard to hear this from dear old friends.
One works in Milwaukee and waiting for her to report…