I clicked through to the tweet you mentioned, which contains a screencap of a chart purporting to show “An Approximate Percentage of the Population That Has COVID-19 Antibodies.” No dates or other info about how these numbers might have been generated.
Fortunately, Gottlieb’s next tweet in the thread contains another screencap of the URLs of the studies mentioned in the chart. I hand-transcribed the Wuhan study URL, and found that while it was performed at a date that’s probably helpful (April 20th) it’s a study in a single hospital in Wuhan, and the abstract explicitly says it’s not a good population estimate:
Here, we reported the positive rate of COVID‐19 tests based on NAT, chest CT scan and a serological SARS‐CoV‐2 test, from April 3 to 15 in one hospital in Qingshan Destrict, Wuhan. We observed a ~10% SARS‐CoV‐2‐specific IgG positive rate from 1,402 tests. Combination of SARS‐CoV‐2 NAT and a specific serological test might facilitate the detection of COVID‐19 infection, or the asymptomatic SARS‐CoV‐2‐infected subjects. Large‐scale investigation is required to evaluate the herd immunity of the city, for the resuming people and for the re‐opened city.
I’d need to know more about e.g. hospitalization rates in Wuhan to interpret this.
The New York numbers seem to come from a press release, with no clear info about how testing was conducted.
All of these are point estimates, and to get ongoing infection rates, I’d need to fit a time series model with too many degrees of freedom. Not saying no one can do this, but definitely saying it’s not clear to me how I can make use of these numbers without working on the problem full time for a few weeks.
You’ve nonspecifically referred to experts and models a few times; that’s not helpful and only serves to intimidate. What would be helpful would be if you could point to specific models by specific experts that make specific claims which you found helpful.
I’m not trying to intimidate; I’m trying to point out that I think you’re making errors that could be corrected by more research, which I hoped would be helpful. I’ve provided one link (which took me some time to dig up). If you don’t find this useful that’s fine, you’re not obligated to believe me and I’m not obligated to turn a LW comment into a lit review.
Given that it apparently took you some time to dig up even as much as a tweet with a screen cap of some numbers that with quite a lot of additional investigation might be helpful, I hope you’re now at least less “confused” about why I am “relying on this back of the envelope rather than the pretty extensive body of work on this question.”
If you want to see something better, show something better.
I clicked through to the tweet you mentioned, which contains a screencap of a chart purporting to show “An Approximate Percentage of the Population That Has COVID-19 Antibodies.” No dates or other info about how these numbers might have been generated.
Fortunately, Gottlieb’s next tweet in the thread contains another screencap of the URLs of the studies mentioned in the chart. I hand-transcribed the Wuhan study URL, and found that while it was performed at a date that’s probably helpful (April 20th) it’s a study in a single hospital in Wuhan, and the abstract explicitly says it’s not a good population estimate:
I’d need to know more about e.g. hospitalization rates in Wuhan to interpret this.
The New York numbers seem to come from a press release, with no clear info about how testing was conducted.
All of these are point estimates, and to get ongoing infection rates, I’d need to fit a time series model with too many degrees of freedom. Not saying no one can do this, but definitely saying it’s not clear to me how I can make use of these numbers without working on the problem full time for a few weeks.
You’ve nonspecifically referred to experts and models a few times; that’s not helpful and only serves to intimidate. What would be helpful would be if you could point to specific models by specific experts that make specific claims which you found helpful.
I’m not trying to intimidate; I’m trying to point out that I think you’re making errors that could be corrected by more research, which I hoped would be helpful. I’ve provided one link (which took me some time to dig up). If you don’t find this useful that’s fine, you’re not obligated to believe me and I’m not obligated to turn a LW comment into a lit review.
Given that it apparently took you some time to dig up even as much as a tweet with a screen cap of some numbers that with quite a lot of additional investigation might be helpful, I hope you’re now at least less “confused” about why I am “relying on this back of the envelope rather than the pretty extensive body of work on this question.”
If you want to see something better, show something better.