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Myths About COVID-19
A number of false ideas are circulating about this disease.
They surveyed 3000 people and found that 1.5% were positive for the antibody to COVID-19. This means that 80 times more people are asymptomatic with COVID-19 than symptomatic. So the lockdown wasn’t necessary.
Nope. 1.5% doesn’t exceed the false positive rate for this type of test, so it doesn’t prove any excess of asymptomatic cases at all. If, say, half of the people screened were positive it would be significant, but not if it’s just 1.5%. There is other evidence of asymptomatic cases, but not nearly 80 times as many; maybe twice to 7 times as many.
The projections for numbers of people infected have been repeatedly wrong and had to be revised repeatedly. We should pay no attention to them.
No, the projections have been reasonably accurate. (How could they miss? The range of uncertainty they published was huge.) Also, it’s normal to make revisions as data comes in. The worst mistake in interpreting these projections occurred early on when the Imperial College group published projections for various scenarios in the US. The first such projection of 2.2 million dead in the US hit the news and, understandably, captured the imagination. It was only later when the rest of the same study was considered that people found out that there was another scenario studied that predicted 60,000 deaths. People thought that this was a revision of the first, higher projection, but that was wrong. It was a scenario that estimated deaths if strong measures to suppress the virus were used. The first number was the estimate for what would happen if nothing was done. (And this was academic anyway since there was no way people would continue to act normally.) And so it has gone, with one failure to understand what the epidemiologists were saying following another. The epidemiologists said that the stricter the efforts of virus suppression the more the lives saved. What choice did politicians have? There’s no question that the efforts to suppress the virus have been successful. The decline in the daily death rates started just about when one would expect them to, 10 to 14 days after suppression efforts started. And there is nothing that will keep the virus from flaring up again if we try to go back to normal.
Efforts to suppress the virus are causing economic harm. We must end these measures to save the economy.
The damage will not entirely end if the economy is suddenly “opened” because people are not going to act normally. Especially not if the virus flares up again. The economic damage is going to continue, hopefully at reduced levels, until the virus is gone or nearly so. To be sure there are a number of unnecessary restrictions that can be dispensed with now, but things are not going back to normal any time soon. You can argue that the government didn’t need to act at all, that people would know to avoid dangerous activities, but people expected the government to act. Most of the work of opening the economy is to convince people that it’s safe to go out again, and to do that we’ve got to make it truly safe.
We’ll have a vaccine in 12-18 months.
Maybe, but don’t count on it. As it turns out they have been trying to produce a vaccine for coronavirus since 2003 when SARS broke out. It’s apparently very tricky. Vaccines strong enough to confer immunity so far have killed the monkeys. We have the advantage right now that there are far more people and labs working on it, but it may take more time or may never happen at all.
The pandemic will follow a bell shaped curve.
Maybe, but there is no guarantee of that. It may be like the Spanish Flu, with multiple waves, or like HIV/AIDS, with a long fat tail that simmers on and on.
Hydroxychloroquine…
This is being used in various places. Other than the occasional testimonies, which are hard to interpret, the evidence that this stuff really works is thin. The history of medicine is repleat with examples of promising treatments with many testimonials of effectiveness that turned out not to work when tested carefully. Our ability to fool ourselves that way is huge. Some antivirals like remdezivir have proven to suppress the virus in animals and show more promise.
Published in Healthcare
https://www.gordonmedical.com/fda-approve-high-dose-iv-vitamin-c-for-coronavirus-patients/
This relaxation will happen by itself. I hope we are right and that many people are developing an active immunity to this disease. Apparently the antibodies attach to the virus so if people do shed the virus, they shed the antibodies too. That’s what we think usually happens.
But today I’m suddenly afraid that we’ve been missing something important with the group we’ve labeled “asymptomatic carriers.”
We need a two-step testing process where we make sure they also have active antibodies. If they don’t, then we’d need to treat them to actually kill the virus–the vitamin C-to-hydrogen peroxide treatment. Otherwise, they will be the source of the really deadly second wave.
Quack quack.
This treatment makes so much sense to me.
I wouldn’t be too quick to dismiss this.
Think oranges and scurvy.
Right… Ignoring the fact that much of the rebuttal “evidence” is just as unproven, and therefore subject to the same criticisms. The real truth is that we simply don’t know, and there are a lot of competing plausible theories.
Not quite the same thing at all. Orally ingesting vitamin C is necessary for our lives because unlike any other animal on the planet except guinea pigs and other primates, we do not synthesize our own vitamin C.
The vitamin C he’s talking about is used an entirely different way. It is extremely high concentrations directly in the blood stream. If you try to ingest the levels of vitamin C that achieve these levels, you will have severe digestive problems and possibly be poisoned. (I’m NOT* a doctor.)
My “quack” comment was intended to apply to the manner that the doctors in the video present their opinions. I am incapable of knowing if their advice is medically sound, but I won’t take that advice from them.
AAAAGGGGHHHH! IMPORTANT EDIT: “I am NOT a doctor. So sorry for that typo.
I’m with Skyler on this one. I don’t know for sure, but claims of magical results from vitamin C and hydrogen peroxide do not inspire confidence.
I don’t have enough information. If they were very recently infected, the symptoms may show up soon. I wouldn’t think that a prison population is representative, so I doubt that we can conclude that the virus is widespread in NC. More likely, there is a specific outbreak in this particular location.
Another point on the NC prison outbreak: it might provide some good data on the IFR (infection fatality rate). But if it’s a recent outbreak, it will probably we weeks before the fatalities occur, if any.
Marci, I would be very skeptical of a claim that vitamin C or hydrogen peroxide somehow kills the virus.
I’m not sure what you mean by “active” antibodies. I think that certain T cells can be “activated,” essentially meaning that they “learn” to make antibodies to a certain pathogen. This “memory” in the T cells allows the body to quickly react to a new infection. So immunity is not necessarily based on the antibody level currently in the blood.
The way you get antibodies is to be infected, or to have a vaccine. We don’t have a vaccine at present, so infection is almost the only route, and the only one that is practical. I think that in some instances, it is possible to extract antibodies from one person and give them to another, but this doesn’t seem practical as a way to obtain widespread immunity.
I’m currently typing this while having ingested Sodium Ascorbate orally, liposomally and via intravenous at the levels which you believe to be poisonous.
THE RIORDAN INTRAVENOUS VITAMIN C (IVC) PROTOCOL FOR ADJUNCTIVE CANCER CARE: IVC AS A CHEMOTHERAPEUTIC
AND BIOLOGICAL RESPONSE MODIFYING AGENT by Hugh Riordan, MD, Neil Riordan, PhD, Joseph Casciari, PhD, James Jackson, PhD,
Ron Hunninghake, MD, Nina Mikirova, PhD, and Paul R. Taylor
Skyler, the analogy I’m seeing is not between scurvy and this virus but between the availability of the cheap vitamin C treatment. :-)
They inspire me. I love the idea of hydrogen peroxide actually killing the virus inside the human body. I don’t think that’s crazy at all. The vitamin C and some other substance in the IV treatment bond to create hydrogen peroxide, and the IV enables it to get to places in the body where it is living (or whatever it does, since I know it is not “alive” per se. :-) ). We know hydrogen peroxide kills viruses. That’s why my pediatricians had me rinsing my kids’ scraped knees with it. :-)
You need to listen to the video. It is really interesting.
I just had a funny thought about what might be causing the kids of the world to not suffer from this virus. I wonder if it’s something really simple: tonsils.
The boomers had their tonsils removed en masse because, and it make sense, the strep bacteria lived in them. Kids kept getting strep throat repeatedly.
They don’t take out tonsils anymore.
I wonder if kids’ tonsils are stopping this virus for them. :-) :-)
For those who are interested in analysis of the case counts, see here:
https://rt.live/
They are making Rt estimates day by day. Details of the analytical approach here:
https://github.com/k-sys/covid-19/blob/master/Realtime%20R0.ipynb
It looks reasonable on a first read.
In their paper they estimate the specificity of the test as between 98.3% and 99.9%. That’s based mostly on the test manufacturer’s figures. If that’s accurate then when 3300 people are tested you’ll get up to 56 people that get a falsely positive test result. They claimed that they got positive results for 50 people (1.5%), which is not significantly higher than the expected false positives. So their results are not significantly different from no patients being truly positive. They have not proven that there’s an excess of asymptomatic cases out there. I’m sure there are asymptomatic cases, but not 80 times as many.
I wish it were true.
I’m not sure sure. At first glance the math seems reasonable. But near as I can tell, “case counts” means positive tests. Although the rate of positive tests has changed over time, it still appears to be true that the number of cases is driven by the number of tests.
A red flag is how much time the author spends talking about his methodology and how little he spends talking about the data. I know that feeling.
@lockeon, thanks for the heads up on this website!
Here’s the thing, though. These guys aren’t quacks, and they’ve designed this study… I highly doubt if they somehow missed that. Also keep in mind that they included a “conclusions” section of what they determined after considering the results, not simply “this is what the numbers say.” If the whole study was invalidated by that possibility of false positives, they would have simply said so.
May also have something to do with the possibility that the degree of specificity doesn’t necessarily work only in one direction. Unless it is impossible to also have false positives, I’d assume that the 98.3- 99% figure is true for any individual test, but that doesn’t necessarily translate directly to the study as a whole.
Yes it’s driven by the number of cases, but the good thing is that creates a conservative result: If testing becomes more widely available, it will likely find more cases, which will result in a somewhat higher R. (The side-effect of testing changes is called out in the their methodology.)
Yes. I just got done reading Andrew Gellman’s comments to the same effect. It sounds just as you say. Wide confidence bounds aren’t necessarily a deal-breaker, but it appears there could be some issues.
Making a virtue of necessity? ;)
Dr. Thomas Levy MD had to have his tonsils ripped out because they were spewing toxins and causing heart problems. They were asymptomatic. Once removed the surgeon could see they were horribly pus infected. He now recommends ozone injections as a safer route as he claims the tonsil surgery as an adult almost killed him.
That’s why they took removed tonsils when the kids were little. Exactly. They so often needed to be taken out later anyway.
I was joking. :-) Sorry. I know that’s not what happened and why younger people are not reacting as strongly to this virus as older people are. :-)
Wasn’t that always the assumption? Lockdown was only to flatten the curve, not to contain. Wuhan flubbed the whole containment thing for the rest of us, whether it came from a wet market or a level 80 bazillion virology lab, they goofed on tackling it, on letting the rest of us know about it, and on any chance of containment.
I learned a new word today from this interesting article my daughter sent me a link to (don’t open it if you loathe the New Yorker, Massachusetts, or Jim Yong Kim, its author and former president of Dartmouth :-) ): durable immunity. That’s what we need to identify and strive for.
To me the great value in testing is to finally figure out the true denominator so we can finally make real risk assessments. So far, seems like roughly half the people think we’ll die like ebola on a mass scale if we venture back to work (never mind that we already mix at the grocery store, liquor store, carry out restaurants, exchanging packages and money with delivery men, Fedex, UPS, and Amazon, not to mention the friggin NYC subway). The other half seems to think that IF you catch covid then chances are slim still for it to become something serious. I tend toward the latter, but I’m open to being wrong and moving with caution. Widespread testing can finally tell us which side of the equation is closer to the truth and therefore what the actual tradeoffs are.