[HN Gopher] NIH study suggests Covid-19 prevalence far exceeded ...
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       NIH study suggests Covid-19 prevalence far exceeded early pandemic
       cases
        
       Author : elorant
       Score  : 17 points
       Date   : 2021-06-24 19:51 UTC (3 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.nih.gov)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.nih.gov)
        
       | eindiran wrote:
       | This infographic from the article itself is quite interesting:
       | https://stm.sciencemag.org/content/scitransmed/early/2021/06...
       | 
       | Also, this stuck out to me from the nih.gov summary:
       | 
       | "The estimate of COVID-19 cases in the United States in mid-July
       | 2020, 3 million in a population of 330 million, should be revised
       | upwards by almost 20 million when the percent of asymptomatic
       | positive results is included," said senior co-author Kaitlyn
       | Sadtler, Ph.D., chief of the NIBIB Section on Immunoengineering.
       | 
       | From the article itself[0]:
       | 
       | "Our results estimate that as of July 2020 there were
       | approximately 4.8 undiagnosed infections (95% CI 2.76-6.81, Fig.
       | S6) for every identified case of COVID-19, suggesting a potential
       | 16.8 million undiagnosed infections by July 2020 in addition to
       | the reported 3 million diagnosed cases in the United States."
       | 
       | It seems like the original quote should actually read "should be
       | revised upwards _to_ almost 20 million ".
       | 
       | [0]
       | https://stm.sciencemag.org/content/early/2021/06/21/scitrans...
        
         | spfzero wrote:
         | In my county, about 245,000 cases before the vaccines arrived,
         | multiplied by 4.8, leads to 35% of the entire county's
         | population having had Covid-19 by then (Feb 2021)
        
       | rurban wrote:
       | Only factor 5? Earlier statistical studies came to factors 6 to
       | 10. Now tests are easier and cheaper, maybe that's why.
        
       | ArkanExplorer wrote:
       | Without politicians and the media driving insane levels of fear,
       | COVID would have come and gone, explained simply as a 'serious
       | flu season', like the kinds we have faced about every decade:
       | 
       | https://swprs.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/sweden-monthly-...
       | 
       | https://www.statista.com/statistics/525353/sweden-number-of-...
        
         | thebruce87m wrote:
         | You are looking at deaths as a measure of how bad it was, when
         | Sweden and other countries put in to place measures to reduce
         | infections and therefore deaths. Can you spot the problem with
         | this?
         | 
         | It's not perfect, but you can compare the severity of each
         | countries measures here:
         | https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/covid-stringency-index?ta...
        
         | nikolay wrote:
         | Really, since when a bad flu season had over 600K deaths?!
        
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       (page generated 2021-06-24 23:02 UTC)