I also suspect and absolutely think a large portion of the reason there is a decrease in hospitalizations is due to mitigation efforts decreasing the initial viral load. That is absolutely borne out of all evidence we know thus far for this virus and is also in line for what we know to be true about other viruses.

Excellent point!

Yes agree NYC will have much higher prevalence but it has 17x the deaths - if fatality rate is similar then it would be like 50%+ of New Yorkers have contracted Covid. Just a little hard to believe.

5.6m people ride the New York subway everyday.

Actually, no they don't. There are 5.6m rides per day. The average trip contains at least two rides: there, and back again. Many trips contain substantially more than two legs, and many people take more than one trip per day.

I can't tell you how many people ride the subway every day, but it's certainly less than half of the number of rides per day.

Number of rides is actually more relevant in this context than number of distinct riders. Each trip involves a new set of people next to you in the train car and a new chance of getting infected.

The number of rides is useless in estimating the percentage of the population with high risk for exposure if you don't also have the proportion of the population exposed to that risk.

There’s a decreasing number of positive test cases each day in NYC too though. At highest point was 50% and now under 30% or so. I’m not sure if those tested get the antibody test as well but it implies a larger percentage of symptomatic people are testing negative in nyc.

Almost no one gets an antibody test yet, unless it's some special controlled study.

Closer to 2 million: https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2020/03/23/the-subway-ridership-...

What makes it hard to believe, exactly?

One way to explain the hospital surge in NYC is that a small percentage of people have had a highly fatal disease. Another plausible explanation is that a much larger number of people have had a less-fatal disease.

To date, we've had very poor estimates for fatality rates and prevalence. It wouldn't be shocking at all to find out that we're off by a factor of 10-, 20-, or even 50-fold.

Typically a sufficiently infectious disease tops out around 50-80% (don't have a source, just what people, like Angela Merkel have been saying). So this implies NYC is already off the high end of that. Hard to believe.

How is that hard to believe that incredibly obvious with the dropping hospitalization rates

NYC has had ~141,000 infections confirmed. If the high end of this study held for NYC (50x), then the true infection count would be around 7M.

That isn't impossible at all, given that the population of NYC is around 8.8M people. It would mean that the city is approaching herd immunity.

(I don't personally think the ratio will be as high in NYC as in LA, but that's just a hunch based on the higher testing rate.)

That's basically the top end of the estimate of what is theoretically possible without a lockdown and infinite time. I just don't buy that it is already maxed out like that.

It's the top end estimate from the study. Even if you take the low-end estimate (~30x), there would be 4.2M cases, which is still ~50% of the New York population.

Basically, you're just saying that you don't want to believe what they're saying, therefore it's hard to believe. But there's nothing illogical or impossible about it in the slightest.

Even 50% is hard to believe. Illogical or impossible, no. Improbable, I think so.

You keep making assumption. You have to concluded the lock-down did nothing, has done nothing, and hasn't prevented any infections. You can make assumption because the numbers don't align to what you assumed they'd be.

If what you're saying is true, then the NYC death rate will drop to zero in three weeks.

I am willing to bet the farm that it won't.

That seems weird since all data points to that being whats happening.

What data?

Yeah, likewise.