Study challenges reports of low fatality rate for COVID-19

[Mike 03]

Medical Xpress
Robert Sanders, University of California - Berkeley
APRIL 27, 2020

A comparison of daily deaths in Italy since January 2020 with those over the previous five years there indicates that the fatality rate in that country for those infected with the new coronavirus is at least 0.8%, far higher than that of the seasonal flu and higher than some recent estimates.

Extrapolating from the Italian data, University of California, Berkeley, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory data scientists estimate that the fatality rate in New York City and Santa Clara County in California can be no less than 0.5%, or one of every 200 people infected.

These conclusions contrast with those of a study posted online last week by Stanford University epidemiologists, who pegged the fatality rate at between 0.1% and 0.2%. An affiliated team from the University of Southern California (USC) this week reported a similar fatality rate in Los Angeles.

"Their final number is much lower than our estimate," said senior author Uros Seljak, a UC Berkeley professor of physics, faculty scientist at Berkeley Lab and member of the Berkeley Institute for Data Science. He also is co-director of the Berkeley Center for Cosmological Physics (BCCP).

Seljak says that getting COVID-19 doubles your chance of dying this year.

Read more: https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-04-fatality-covid-.html

[Fiendish Thingy]

1. The Santa Clara County study has been discredited

The two doctors who authored it are conservative anti-lockdowners who have been pushing their study on Fox News and other right wing outlets.

A scientific rebuttal to the study has been posted here on DU.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

3. Thank you. Perhaps someone can post the DU rebuttal link. . . . nt

[Fiendish Thingy]

18. Here's a couple of external links:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/23/coronavirus-antibody-studies-california-stanford

https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Santa-Clara-antibody-test-study-Stanford-COVID-19-15210149.php

https://www.salon.com/2020/04/26/scientists-feud-over-hyped-stanford-coronavirus-antibody-study-the-authors-owe-us-all-an-apology/

https://www.forbes.com/sites/carlieporterfield/2020/04/21/scientists-widely-criticize-studies-that-claim-coronavirus-death-rate-could-be-far-lower-than-believed/#1dab518f1517

https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/04/experts-demolish-studies-suggesting-covid-19-is-no-worse-than-flu/

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-20/antibody-test-for-covid-19-debate-over-testing-accuracy-results

[Bernardo de La Paz]

19. Thank you. The Guardian one (first) was very good. . . . nt

[Igel]

20. All the first one did was introduce uncertainty.

Along with deft switches of modality, in which "could have been" morphs into "were".

"Some tests are a disaster" entails "this particular test was a disaster."

Saying that we still don't know =/= we do know and they're wrong. We don't know. They could be right. There's no reason to believe they are, any more than pretty much any other. After that it's belief.

More to the point, different means of calculating antibody prevalence pretty much so far all boil down to the assumptions made, and people fight over the calculations because there's no point fighting over the assumptions. They're all fairly reasonable.

And where it looks like there may be valid data, people rush to say that antibodies don't mean immunity (so let's do what I think we need to do) or that's only for a specific area and is meaningless in every other respect (so let's do what I think we need to do).

[underpants]

13. I was wondering about that

As I said below, I heard about these studies last week and expected them to be pushed a lot. Haven’t seen it as much as expected.

The obvious answer would be, so what? If anything it just shows how horrific the testing was handled. Also, okay so the percentage isn’t AS BAD as predicted but we just had 50,000 people die in 6 weeks and you want to talk percentages???

[Dem2]

2. Didn't NY use actual data (antibody testing) to confirm an 0.78% mortality rate?

That's the only number that matters now.

[SWBTATTReg]

9. I thought that they did, and Cuomo even said that the total number of infectees discovered...

in reality vs. current guesses of the true rate of infections brought the level of fatalities down percentage wise, which he said it was somewhat a good thing, it brought down the true level of the percentage of fatalities, e.g., 1000,000 people infected vs. the new studies vs. 100,000 previously infected brought fatality rates down by a factor of 10 (an example of mine, not actually percentages by the way).

The fact still remains, that rump ignored the warnings, and allowed this scourge to run unchecked in this country, for some months now. Criminal charges should be prepared for everyone in rump's administration (including rump) that is part of the conspiracy to hide the truth about this administration's dismal and pathetic record on handling this pandemic.

[Dem2]

16. It's still around 50X worse than the flu

...according to CDC statistics: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr68/nvsr68_09-508.pdf

Let's not forget that.

[Igel]

22. That's precisely the issue.

The flu stats we pretty much accept.

But to say COVID is 50x worse that the flu you have to know how dangerous COVID is--and we don't. We used to say that 3.4% of those infected get it. Fauci went on record over a month ago saying that he thought that the number would come in under 1%. Some estimates put it at .9, .8, .7., all the way down to 0.2%.

Now, 0.2% is both only 2-4x as bad as the flu in an average season. At the same time, it's not the risk per person but the fact that far more people could be infected and suffer that matters, because that would be a lot more deaths than from the flu. (But here people start going off the rails, because having based the letahlity of the virus on average flu deaths they switch over and use a really bad flu season for comparison--in other words, they use one number calculation that 2-4x and later replace that number quietly to make a point that the numbers themselves probably don't support.)

[Igel]

21. Yes, but the debunking goes like this.

The antibody tests can't be trusted. They're often wrong. Often so wrong that they're meaningless.

That means we don't know anything, you'd think.

But we do know that since those numbers are wrong, the older, higher projections based on data we know are wrong must be right.

If you think there's logic in reaching that conclusion and it's not just finding a rationale to support a given viewpoint, let me know.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

4. When obits in Lombardy run 10 pages instead of 1 or 2, it's not the flu. In NYC

In New York City, for a week or two, deaths ran at 600 per day. Normal death rate this time of year was about 150 per day.

Now consider that there were fewer deaths by car accident and crime, too.

It's not the flu.

[exboyfil]

5. An insanely communicable disease with multiple transmission paths

with something around a 1% lethality. If you aren't scared, you aren't paying attention.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

6. UK totals do not (yet) include deaths at home and deaths at long term care facilities. . . . nt

[roamer65]

15. The actual infections is MUCH higher.

COVID-45 is dragging his feet on testing because it will lay bare his utter failure.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

7. US case 980,000+, death 55,000+. Arithmetic says that's 5.6 % mortality of known cases. . . nt

[SWBTATTReg]

10. They do think that they actually undercounted the true number of CV cases, and probably ...

undercounted the death rate too, being that some deaths weren't reported as CV-related.

Will we ever get a true accounting of the true number of cases and deaths?

[roamer65]

17. We need investigation of all pneumonia deaths from October 2019 onward.

I think we will find some in December and January.

[SWBTATTReg]

24. Definitely a good idea!

[dalton99a]

8. Pdf of paper:

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.15.20067074v2.full.pdf

[Raven123]

11. Without robust quality controlled testing using standardized procedures and methods, its guessing

[underpants]

12. I heard about this first last week in RW media. Figured it would become

a big thing but I don’t see it being drummed up as much as I expected.

[crickets]

14. K&R for visibility.

[malaise]

23. K & R

Important