>> Don't think you're invulnerable, cause you're not. Don't think that if you get no or only mild symptoms, no harm is done.
Such statements were true a few months ago. Now 1 in 6 Londoners have had the disease. So those 1 in 6 know exactly how it will impact them because it already has. There are now more than a few people out there who can confidently say "I'll be fine" because they are fine. In coming days/months many people will be getting tests and learning that they have suffered and recovered from the disease at least once. Others will learn that they have been living with someone who has had the disease but it didn't spread even within the household. The days of shouting "you don't know, you might die" at every naysayer are behind us.
"With further statistical adjustments, they found about 17% of London adults had been infected; this compares to only 4.3% in the north-east of England."
That is as true for any flu - or indeed any disease - as it is for COVID-19. There are many diseases out there and most people don't know very much about any of them regarding what a 2nd infection might do. It isn't a reason for them to behave any differently to how they behaved in 2019.
How common is that? I know there have been a few cases where it's believed to happen, but similarly there are some cases of people getting chicken pox more than once. With chickenpox, that's rare enough that chicken pox is generally considered something that you only get once, but it does happen.
That doesn't answer my question though. What does the data actually say about the covid reinfection rate? I've heard of anecdotes, but haven't seen any numbers.
"The top stories on Thursday: UK government data suggests around one in six people in London and one in 20 elsewhere in England have had coronavirus"
"With further statistical adjustments, they found about 17% of London adults had been infected; this compares to only 4.3% in the north-east of England."
That's the _BBC_, perhaps the most respected news organization on the planet, and unarguably an expert on all things London. They are citing information released by the UK government: 1 in 6 Londoners. Misinformation my a--.
One of the things we have learned during this pandemic is that reputable sources are capable of publishing false information. So we can’t just take their assertions as facts. We have to ask them to explain how they arrived at them.
The claim that one in 6 Londoners have had the virus is particularly suspicious because Sweden made similar claims about infections in Stockholm based on rough estimates and they turned out to be wrong when actual studies were carried out.
It was the government figures, and it raised far more questions - London has an IFR of half that of the rest of the UK, does that mean it’s spread more widely amongst healthy people? Does the antibody year require a higher viral load (which you’d get spending a long time on the tube compared with driving to work in north east).
Need larger antibody tests and data broken down by demographic, globally, but we’ll have them by summer.
The BBC an expert in all things London? Maybe if you define away all the people in the city who aren't like BBC employees! Your view of the BBC is quite out of date. Most of the British population say now in polls they don't trust it. It's an open question for how long it'll stick around.
> "England has had 132k reported cases. London has a population of 8.9M."
I personally know about a dozen people in London who have had probable Covid-19, including myself. None of those cases were ever actually confirmed by testing or "reported" to anyone.
Until you actually have an antibody test result, be careful to equate "probably COVID-19" with "COVID-19". I have a friend who lives in the NYC metro area who was sure he had COVID-19 in March. All the symptoms matched, felt like he was dying for 6 weeks. Never tested, because tests were in short supply then, but his doctor said it was very likely COVID. He just took an antibody test and got the results yesterday. Negative for COVID-19.
Swine flu was going around this winter, which also will knock you out for a month. If you didn't specifically get a coronavirus PCR test positive, there's about a 10:1 chance that what you actually had was the flu. Outside of major hotspots like NYC and Chelsea MA, I believe the serological studies that suggest about 2-4% of the population has had coronavirus.
It’s not clear yet how reliable the antibody tests are. Antibodies fade over time, and we don’t know how long Covid-19 antibodies remain detectable in your blood. It’s quite possible that after 6 weeks or so, you’ll no longer have easily detectable levels of antibodies.
We also do not know the seroconversion rate for mild or asymptomatic cases (every study measuring this seems to use an entirely-hospitalized or mostly-hospitalized cohort).
I can't believe that people are quick to tell me that the pneumonia I had in January couldn't possibly have been COVID-19, but they say that every death since January is COVID caused.
> but they say that every death since January is COVID caused.
I have no idea where you came up with this nonsense, but if anything there are academic studies demonstrating that, even in countries that do a honest job reporting covid19 deaths, Covid19 deaths have been systematically underreported.
Who, exactly, says every death since January is caused by COVID-19? I cannot find any statistics which suggest that about 20 million people have died to coronavirus this year.
You may be confusing this with excess deaths count, which is tracking the difference between deaths in a given month of 2020 and deaths in the same month in previous year (or years, averaged). Assuming no other unknown disease or phenomenon other than COVID-19 is silently ravaging our societies, this is the most reliable metric we have - as government after government has been caught on underreporting COVID-19 deaths.
But that's clearly a false assumption. It assumes hospitals can be emptied and society put under house arrest with no excess deaths as a consequence, which is not only a very strange assumption but contradicted by huge amounts of evidence.
There's by now a whole lot of people, including many experts in many domains, who are concluding the lockdown will kill more people than the disease itself. Far more if it turns out they had little impact, which there is also quite some evidence of.
You can filter out deaths by suicide and similar, of which there isn't many so far (but yes, maybe the lockdown will kill more; it hasn't now). You kind of already have to filter out things like deaths by traffic accidents, of which there's much less now.
And consider that heart attack and stroke centers are seeing precipitous drops in patient referrals, almost certainly meaning that the fear of catching COVID-19 is causing many people to avoid treatment and die at home: https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/patients-with-heart-at...
In my case, fever which lasted less than 24 hours. Felt like I was coming down with a bad flu, but the fever was over much more quickly than any flu would be.
Lingering symptoms for a week or so afterwards: “shortness of breath” feeling with slightly sore/tingling chest (but no congestion, snot or phlegm), mild dry cough, all-over muscle aches, feeling much more tired than usual, and sleeping longer than usual. I did not notice any loss of sense of smell.
The data (and you have to scroll down to find the details) is based on antibody tests carried out on a sample of 1000 people living in London and elsewhere and extrapolated from that, and not on people who have tested positive for the virus. The selection criteria are not mentioned, but a random sample of 1000 would have an error margin of 3%. False positive rate for the test is 0.2%: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-52656808
- Number of tests available are limited still (and were severely so until recently)
- People who are showing symptoms but aren't high risk have been turned away after pre-screening
- People who are showing symptoms but aren't front line workers have been turned away after pre-screening
- People who have had severe exposure but aren't showing symptoms have been turned away after pre-screening
(Heck, understanding it's an anecdote, but my neighbour showed all the symptoms, after waiting hours and talking to all the pre-screeners, they told him, literally "Yup, you have it; we don't need to bother testing". )
Anecdata notwithstanding, it is crucial for people to understand that the number of tested positive cases is by definition, always, under all circumstances, always going to be some subset of people actually sick. And sometimes significantly so... sometimes by order(s) of magnitude.
I am always rolling my eyes at breathless news reports along the lines of "the actual number of deaths may be higher than the official count!"
Of course they are going to be higher.
Even the official counts can be fuzzy. For example, people dying of cancer are often carried off by pneumonia due to their weakened state. Was the cause of death the cancer or the pneumonia?
Such statements were true a few months ago. Now 1 in 6 Londoners have had the disease. So those 1 in 6 know exactly how it will impact them because it already has. There are now more than a few people out there who can confidently say "I'll be fine" because they are fine. In coming days/months many people will be getting tests and learning that they have suffered and recovered from the disease at least once. Others will learn that they have been living with someone who has had the disease but it didn't spread even within the household. The days of shouting "you don't know, you might die" at every naysayer are behind us.
"With further statistical adjustments, they found about 17% of London adults had been infected; this compares to only 4.3% in the north-east of England."
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/world-52749186