Preliminary test results suggest 21% of NYC residents have Covid antibodies

Re:Preliminary test results suggest 21% of NYC residents hav... by themgt on Thursday April 23, 2020 @07:11PM (#22962685)

It's actually important to point out, the CDC is very explicit that they are estimating flu illnesses, in their own words "an estimated 34 million people had symptomatic influenza illness"

Many people are attempting to extrapolate asymptomatic COVID to estimate an infection fatality rate and then making comparisons to CDC flu data for symptomatic illness, which is completely wrong. Actual flu sero studies suggest a large fraction of the population gets flu every year[1] and IFR is more like 0.02->0.05%, so even taking NYC numbers at face value COVID looks 10-50x more fatal than flu.

[1] https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/jou...

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Re:Preliminary test results suggest 21% of NYC residents hav... by nodamage on Thursday April 23, 2020 @08:18PM (#22963220)

Yes this is happening all over this thread and is absolutely not a valid comparison. I'm also seeing people compare age-stratified Covid rates with overall flu fatality rates which is also invalid for similar reasons.

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Re:Preliminary test results suggest 21% of NYC residents hav... by jnbiche on Thursday April 23, 2020 @08:25PM (#22963268)

>IFR is more like 0.02->0.05%, so even taking NYC numbers at face value COVID looks 10-50x more fatal than flu.

Exactly, my only point in mentioning approximate flu IFR was to demonstrate that it's significantly lower than flu CFR. And so the NY COVID-19 serological study suggests a CFR well above 1%.

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Re:Preliminary test results suggest 21% of NYC residents hav... by kavalg on Friday April 24, 2020 @04:49AM (#22965943)

Is there any actual evidence that the flu vaccines indeed work? Given that 'flu' is actually a very broad term for a disease that can be caused by =many different viruses that also mutate each year.

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