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Coronavirus Reported Cases About 3% of Actual Cases
There is an interesting report out of Germany, from a study in a municipality called Gangelt in Germany, on the Dutch border. Gangelt is a small place, part of the District of Heinsberg in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia. North Rhine-Westphalia is mostly the Ruhr, though Heinsberg is a bit east of the Ruhr area proper. Heinsberg is a small place itself, about 240 square miles (smaller than NYC and about the same size as the incorporated City of Tucson, where I live, though the Tucson metro area is much larger).
I. About 30 Times More People Had COVID-19 Than Reported
Heinsberg is apparently the most infected part of Germany, according to Wikipedia (here), with an infection rate of 0.5% as of March 29. They tested 1,000 people at random from Gangelt, with an antibody test, and found that 15% had previously had COVID-19. This is 30 times higher than the percentage of people with reported, “confirmed” cases.
Here is the paper (in German). Here is an amateur English translation, and here is a decent report in the Spectator.
As usual, the media seem quite incompetent and, frankly, the doctors performing the study don’t provide the obvious information. They never mention the reported “confirmed” case rate for the town or the district. They don’t even say when they drew the samples. There are many other reports in the media, which repeat the conclusion of the paper that the case fatality rate is 0.37%, much lower than previously reported, though neither the media outlets nor the paper explains how they performed this calculation.
Based on this limited information, it appears that the number of people who have already had COVID-19 is about 30 times higher than the number of reported “confirmed” cases. The calculation is simple. The percentage of people in this German district with reported, “confirmed” cases was 0.5%. The percentage testing positive in the antibody test was 15%, which is 30 times higher. Incidentally, they found that 2.0% were currently infected, 4 times the number of cumulative reported, “confirmed” cases.
Another way of looking at it is that cumulative total of reported “confirmed” cases is about 3% of actual infections.
This is preliminary data, but it is the best that I’ve seen thus far.
Let’s apply these numbers to New York. I just looked up the numbers for NYC for yesterday (April 10), and it has about 1,000 reported cases per 100,000 — which is just about exactly 1%. (Per 100,000, it is: Staten Island 1,362; Bronx 1,338; Queens 1,286; Brooklyn 957; Manhattan 781.)
Applying the 30x figure from the Gangelt data, this would imply that 30% of NYC residents have already been infected.
More evidence of the amazing ability of our politicians, and the leaders of the medical community, to resoundingly slam that barn door shut, just as soon as they notice that the horse is gone. Oh, and then burn the barn down.
II. “Contact Tracing” May Be Nonsense
By the way, if you’re interested in “contact tracing” and the hypothesis that those wonderful and brilliant Asians in South Korea and Singapore are so much better than we stupid, bumbling Americans because they implemented aggressive contact tracing right away, read the Wikipedia page (here) on the progress of the COVID-19 pandemic in North Rhine-Westphalia. I’ll give you a summary.
The very first case discovered in Germany was a guy named Bernd, who performed on stage with his dance team at a carnival celebration on Feb. 15 in Gangelt, attended by about 300 people. Bernd was already infected, but nobody knew it, and he later tested positive on Feb. 25. Then his wife tested positive the next day, and the authorities confirmed 14 new cases in Heinsberg (9 from tiny Gangelt). According to Wikipedia, “[a]ll of them were placed in home isolation.”
It didn’t matter. Heinsberg started to be called “Germany’s Wuhan” by the end of March. Here’s an example, from The Guardian in jolly old England. (If you don’t know The Guardian, they’re the most unbelievable pack of Leftist lunatics and idiots that I’ve yet encountered, who manage to make the buffoons at the NYT and even Rachel Maddow look reasonable by comparison. But that’s just my opinion.)
I acknowledge that this is only anecdotal evidence, but then so are all of the claims that the brilliant South Koreans and Singaporeans and other organized, disciplined Asians stopped this thing in its tracks with their testing and contract tracing. Maybe. Maybe we’re so bumbling and inefficient and stupid, here in the States, that we couldn’t do it.
But to believe that, you have to believe that the Germans are bumbling and inefficient. The Germans. Right.
III. My Apologies
I admit that I’m getting frustrated about all of this. I’m increasingly coming to believe that we’ve been lied to and played. By the politicians, and the media, and the medical “establishment” (whatever that it). It’s not just this new information reported in this post. I’ve been looking into these issues carefully, and the evidence has contradicted “the narrative” at nearly every turn.
It’s very annoying. It’s worst from the IHME, but maybe that’s because I’ve been watching them more closely. I’m not going to link it, but that Murray fellow said that the fact that we were reaching the peak earlier is evidence that martial law, I mean social distancing, is working.
Balderdash. They told us that social distancing would “flatten the curve.” Remember that? Well, flattening the curve means that the peak is reached later, but it is a shallower peak. Instead, the IHME’s data says that the peak is happening earlier than they expected, and is sharper. That’s the opposite of what we were told would happen under the house-arrest regime.
Sen. Portman, on the Ricochet podcast, basically said the same thing, taking credit for the lack of a catastrophe in Ohio because of the prompt imposition of martial law. I like Rob Portman, and I couldn’t bear to listen to that hogwash. I don’t blame him personally. I suspect that he’s relying on the so-called experts, and they’re talking nonsense. I do wish that he’d see through it.
I suspected, from the get-go, that this was a hysterical overreaction, but I did not expect that we would be misled so brazenly. I did appreciate our friend Doc Savage on the Ricochet podcast just released, essentially saying that we really messed this one up, and need to find a way to get everybody back to work.
Am I missing something?
ChiCom delenda est.
Published in Healthcare
It’s not worth quibbling about the nuances between a county and a German Landkreis in this context. I was just trying to provide the closest example based on having lived in Germany for 10 years.
In any case, this level of dissection of the details is not productive in this situation. I linked to the press conference in which the scientists who know the Covid-19 situation in Gangelt better than anyone else in the world said they thought the confirmed case load was 5%. If they can only provide an uncertain estimate, than neither you nor I can provide anything more worthwhile from afar.
In any case, there’s plenty of reason to think that the actual ratio of undetected cases to detected cases is higher in most jurisdictions than their ballpark figure of 3-fold. After all, Gangelt has been more thoroughly PCR-tested than almost any other place in the world.
I’d bet good money that are numerous jurisdictions in the US where the number of seropositve individuals is 100-fold higher than the number of PCR-confirmed cases. Conversely, there are certainly other areas where that ratio is substantially less (like NYC, where 1.2% of the total population already has a PCR-confirmed case).
This study (also from Germany) is based solely on a figure modeled by the Imperial College group.
In one of their papers where they predicted doom and gloom with a case fatality rate over 1%, they also calculated an “infection fatality rate” of 0.66%. Funny enough, that “infection fatality rate” is actually what most people think of when they hear “case fatality rate”: i.e. what are my chances of dying if I catch the virus?
The fact that nobody pointed out this terminological sleight of hand really irked me at the time and was a good demonstration of scientific malpractice by this hallowed group at Imperial College.
Two points though:
a) a 0.66% fatality rate is nothing to sneeze at depending on how much of the population is truly susceptible (and the Diamond Princess data is far from conclusive on that point) and how quickly the infection spreads. That fatality rate could still cause quite a bit of chaos, albeit much less than what the Imperial College group themselves would lead you to believe.
b) In my opinion the true infection fatality rate will be even lower. The data used to calculate the 0.66% fatality rate is based solely on PCR testing – albeit in another group (expats evacuated from Wuhan) who were very thoroughly tested. Still, anyone in that group who already had an asymptomatic infection before evacuation would not have been caught by that method.
My gut sense is still that the infection fatality rate will end up being somewhere between 0.25-0.5%, and that the susceptible percentage of the population will be well above 19% but considerably below 80%. But that’s pure speculation.
In any case, this whole discussion is why I think looking at deaths is still better than scavenging for tea leaves at the local landfill to try to decipher the true number of overall cases.
Instead of looking at a cruise ship of 3,500 and a town of 12,000, let’s look at a city of 8.4 million (NYC), another city of 6.6 million (Madrid), and a small state-sized region of 10 million (Lombardy).
In each of those three cases, the virus has apparently killed (or is well on track to kill) about 1 out of every 1,000 residents within the span of about a month. Of course the data on this, like all coronavirus-related data, is still murkier than we would like. But there is considerable corroborating evidence that the virus had some causal role in the vast majority of these deaths (at least as causal as the seasonal flu has in deaths we count as “flu deaths”). We also have very good evidence that the overwhelming majority of the deceased were old, already in poor health, and that many (if not most) would likely have not survived longer than a year or two in the absence of the virus.
Considering that an average flu season in the US kills an estimated 1 in every 10,000 Americans over a roughly 4-month span, a virus that kills 1 in every 1,000 residents of NYC within a single month is certainly worthy of the moniker “definitely different from the normal flu”. Simultaneously, a virus that is statistically less harmful to under 50-year-olds than a daily car commute is worthy of the moniker “definitely not the 1918 flu”.
If we could get about 75% of the US population to acknowledge those outer bounds of the subjective characterization of this virus, we’d be in a much better position to make useful steps forward.
I do not think of masks as being in any way less intrusive or reasonable, nor is it within the government’s power to mandate such a thing.
Probably virus load factor. The densely packed subway cars were a great inoculation site. The hard hit cities all have public transportation. Los Angeles, a big city where almost everybody drives his/her own car, is far less affected.
The biggest folly of looking at cities like New York for national policy is that 99% of the rest of the country doesn’t benefit from policies designed around New York. Kind of like their laughable notions that nobody should own cars and everyone should live in highrise apartments. Fact is, new york is its own world and should be treated as such. And frankly, I don’t give a rat’s ass what happens in that foreign country, with respect to how I plan to live my own life.
Looking at the suggested remedies for this disease, especially from Democrat officials like the Governor of Michigan, it is helpful to think of the TSA as a model.