Coronavirus, Covid 19 Discussion and How It Has Affected Your Daily Life Chat Thread

[Winter Creek Coop]

Ok. Thanks. I fixed it on mine but its still on your quote.

 

[LaFleche]

Ok. Thanks. I fixed it on mine but its still on your quote.

Thank you, but yours still has one left to remove right above 'Retired pediatrician'.

 

[Winter Creek Coop]

Thank you, but yours still has one left to remove right above 'Retired pediatrician'.

Haha thanks. Missed the second one.

 

[LaFleche]

Haha thanks. Missed the second one.

That is an interesting report, thank you for posting it.

 

[Winter Creek Coop]

You are welcome.

 

[ChocolateMouse]

Note that is says "dear editor" at the top. (@LaFleche, it's not a report fyi.)
Because it's from the comments section of a study, on which anyone with a subscription to that website can comment.

https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4471/

I saw a comment in the comments section of one study saying it wasn't scientifically sound because it used cells breeding techniques developed on aborted fetus tissues in the 70's. Since the 50 year old aborted fetuses couldn't consent to the development of the technique the whole study should be thrown out for ethical violations. Just because an objection exists doesn't make it logically sound.

Wall of technical data and math below. Feel free to crunch the numbers yourself.

Spoiler

So lets look at their argument. They're right that the numbers for CURRENT figures have an NTV of 170-1370. If you were to run the current NTV vs current population you'd come to an NTV number like 258,190. 258K. But that's because the population is vaccinated, right? Uncontrolled the NTV is craaaazy high. Well, the same sort of prevention techniques are true of the USA population right now.
COVID is new and not every person has gotten it yet. Measles, for example, had been around for literally hundreds of years. Every single person ever had the potential to be exposed to it. By the time COVID-19 has been around for 500 years I imagine it will be as endemic as Measles. It's not really fair to compare the NTV of a disease that's been around for one year to one that's been around for hundreds - frankly there hasn't been enough time for the exposure to cause an accurate long-term NTV. Not to mention efforts to stop the spread are being taken - social distancing, masking, sanitation, travel restrictions, etc.

If we DID leave it uncontrolled for years, what would the NTV be? Well, it has a global death rate of about 2/100 confirmed cases right now. Information suggests the highest rate of unconfirmed cases is 40%. Skeptical sources suggest 66% of total cases are asymptomatic. In Ohio it's about 5 hospitalizations per 100 confirmed cases and 1/5 hospitalizations will die. This is twice better than the global average so I'll just use Ohio numbers to run my data.
We can safely assume from this data that it's much more likely that the actual number of people infected with COVID is twice the number of confirmed cases. (Maybe a bit more or less but one unconfirmed case for every confirmed case is easy to work with and you can add margin of error later.)

If every single person in the US were exposed COVID over time, as would be more likely if it had been around for hundreds of years like measles had, the NTV would be MUCH higher. Chances are good you'd be looking at about 1 death, 5 hospitalizations per 100 confirmed or 200 total cases. That's an NTV of 40. Not 1370. Even if you took into account that everyone who's sick is immune for 3 months, that's still an NTV of about 50. It's ONLY 1370 right now because of time and prevention, much like the technical measles NTV is 285K.
And this doesn't even include long term effects of having gotten sick. Long haulers are real.

So... It's not so much the data is wrong. It's that the data is incomplete. Some sources say case counts are plateauing some say they're rising. But we have no idea what uncontrolled spread would like like a year from now, let alone 500+ like measles had. And we never really did develop herd immunity to measles through anything but vaccines.

tldr; As the commenter themselves points out, the NTV for meningitis is 33K and we still get that vaccine. Because those deaths are preventable. So, I mean, yes. You can argue that 1700+NTV is high. But it's also WELL within the limits for MANY vaccines. And it's only that high because the disease is new and we're not in global uncontrolled spread yet.

NTV is a tool with limited use in new diseases. So limited it's not a term that's used very often. (Google it.) Still good to know. But also limited in how useful it is because of how many alternatives have to be considered. That NTV number only holds up if we keep social distancing and masking and shutting things down AND the cases stop climbing as a result. Forever.

 

[ChocolateMouse]

I really like their featured coronavirus article on this website though. VERY informative.

https://www.bmj.com/content/372/bmj.n26

 

[aart]

Note that is says "dear editor" at the top.

I did.

 

[LaFleche]

Note that is says "dear editor" at the top. (@LaFleche, it's not a report fyi.)

To my understanding he is reporting the listed findings to the 'Dear Editor'

 

[ChocolateMouse]

To my understanding he is reporting the listed findings to the 'Dear Editor'

Yep. While he's permitted to comment on it, like most comment sections it doesn't mean the commenter fully understands it or that their comment is valuable or peer reviewed. Like I mentioned, it's a flawed calculation.