Wuhan Virus Watch: Antibody testing finds CA’s Bay Area infections may be 85 times higher than reported
During Friday’s briefing, Dr. Fauci says coronavirus testing ‘isn’t everything’ when it comes to reopening states. Florida reopens its beaches.
Today’s update will start with a reminder that Legal Insurrection reported that it’s suspected that California had been dealing with coronavirus infections far earlier that originally reported, perhaps as early as November, 2019.
This week, a team of Stanford researchers has determined that in Santa Clara county, infections may actually be up to 85 times higher than health officials have tallied. The analysis plays a critical role in determining the mortality rate associated with COVID-19.
Earlier this month, Stanford University-led researchers tested 3,330 adults and children in Santa Clara County, who were recruited using Facebook ads, for SARS-CoV-2 antibodies and found that the population prevalence of COVID-19 in Santa Clara ranged from 2.49 percent to 4.16 percent.
“The most important implication of these findings is that the number of infections is much greater than the reported number of cases,” the researchers wrote, in a yet-to-be peer-reviewed study. “Our data imply that, by April 1 (three days prior to the end of our survey) between 48,000 and 81,000 people had been infected in Santa Clara County. The reported number of confirmed positive cases in the county on April 1 was 956, 50-85-fold lower than the number of infectious predicted by this study.”
Asymptomatic carriers of coronavirus have long been a concern for health officials and others who are looking to get a grasp on how prevalent the virus is. The researchers also concluded that detecting previously unreported coronavirus cases could also lead to a “better estimation of the fatality rate from COVID-19.”
“Many estimates of fatality rate use a ratio of deaths to lagged cases (because of duration from case confirmation to death), with an infections-to-cases ratio in the 1-5 fold range as an estimate of under-ascertainment,” the researchers wrote. “Our study suggests that adjustments for under-ascertainment may need to be much higher.”
Fauci says coronavirus testing isn’t everything when it comes to reopening states
As states look to reopen, one concern is how important testing will play in the determination of the reopen date and its success. During Friday’s briefing, Vice President Mike Pence said, “We believe today that we have the capacity in the United States to do a sufficient amount of testing for states to move into phase one in the time and manner that they deem appropriate.”
Despite press doubts, Coronavirus Task Force member Dr. Anthony Fauci supported the assertion and indicated that testing “isn’t everything.”
Fauci, who enjoys broad respect among Democrats for his willingness to contradict President Trump, said testing concerns are over-hyped as Trump proposes that states pursue a phased reopening.
“The emphasis that we’ve been hearing is essentially ‘testing is everything’ and it isn’t,” Fauci said Friday night at a White House press conference.
Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, spoke after Democrats spent Friday slamming Trump for pushing a reopening of states as reckless without broader testing.
…Fauci likened new coronavirus infections to his experience with HIV/AIDS. He said people don’t contract the virus without risky behavior. For COVID-19, Fauci said that risk mitigation such as social distancing reduces the likelihood of catching the virus.
“It’s the kinds of things that we’ve been doing, the mitigation strategies that are an important part,” Fauci said.
“What we really needed for for Phase One is to be able to identify, isolate [and] contact trace,” Fauci said. “A very important part of when you’re pulling back gradually and slowly on the mitigation, and you have people who might be infected, you want to know they’re infected, you want to put them in care.”
Dr. Fauci explains the two different types of #coronavirus tests: One that tests whether a person is infected, and another that tests if someone was previously infected. https://t.co/eOGI4nbPU4 pic.twitter.com/iizBPg7Tss
— KPIX 5 (@KPIXtv) April 17, 2020
Sunlight destroys virus quickly, new govt. tests find, as does heat and high humidity
Department of Homeland Security testing on the coronavirus indicates that the pathogen can be destroyed quickly in sunshine and is sensitive to high temperature and humidity.
Preliminary results from government lab experiments show that the coronavirus does not survive long in high temperatures and high humidity, and is quickly destroyed by sunlight, providing evidence from controlled tests of what scientists believed — but had not yet proved — to be true.
A briefing on the preliminary results, marked for official use only and obtained by Yahoo News, offers hope that summertime may offer conditions less hospitable for the virus, though experts caution it will by no means eliminate, or even necessarily decrease, new cases of COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. The results, however, do add an important piece of knowledge that the White House’s science advisers have been seeking as they scramble to respond to the spreading pandemic.
The study found that the risk of “transmission from surfaces outdoors is lower during daylight” and under higher temperature and humidity conditions. “Sunlight destroys the virus quickly,” reads the briefing.
Beaches in Florida Reopen
Hopefully, the success of the DHS test showing that the virus is sensitive to high humidity and sunshine is about to be confirmed.
Crowds of beachgoers have charged on to the beaches in Jacksonville, Florida after the shores reopened to the public despite the coronavirus pandemic.
Jacksonville beaches reopened at 5pm on Friday under limited hours and use restrictions, even as Florida recorded its highest single-day increase in confirmed coronavirus cases.
Photos and video from the scene show enthusiastic residents cheering as they ran out onto the sand after weeks of closures.
Florida Department of Health said confirmed cases in the state rose by 1,421 Friday, the highest one-day number yet. The total number of cases in Florida is now 24,753. The number of deaths has reached 726, an increase of 58 in the last 24 hours.
Jacksonville’s beaches will be open daily from 6am to 11am and 5pm to 8pm for exercise such as walking and swimming only. Banned are sunbathing, chairs, towels, or loitering on the shore, and beachgoers are required to remain six feet apart.
Demonstrators gather in Huntington Beach to protest California’s stay-at-home order
Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, protesters are demanding that the Golden State start to reopen.
More than 100 demonstrators gathered in Huntington Beach Friday, defying social distancing guidelines, to protest California’s stay-at-home order.
The rally comes a day after the city announced that it was closing off all metered parking along the Pacific Coast Highway to limit beach visitations amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
…“We’re here in defiance of Gavin Newsom and his socialist agenda to ruin our economy,” said a man hosting a livestream of the event on Facebook. “We’re definitely not practicing social distancing, which is all right in my book. Believe in Jesus — you won’t fear death.”
Demonstrators could be seen holding up signs that read, “Liberate Huntington Beach,” “Open Cali Now,” “Let us work,” “Pandemics does not cancel our constitutional rights!!” and “COVID-19 is a lie.”
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Wuhan virus arrived earlier and nobody noticed. San Francisco has only 1058 cases and 20 deaths. That is not all due to self isolation.
There was another stunning drop in projections by the IHME model; the current model being used by U.S. government officials on the coronavirus task force.
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2020/04/08/wow-good-news-latest-covid-19-projections-show-peak-on-saturday-and-total-deaths-60000-same-as-2017-2018-flu-season/
Everyone should read this also.
April 16, 2020
Trump pulling off the impossible again
By Lloyd Marcus friend said his 40-something-year-old son caught coronavirus and wrote funeral instructions. His son made a full recovery in four days.
I am excited to announce that more and more people are finally realizing fake news media and health experts bludgeoning us with their lie that corona is the deadliest virus of all times is politically motivated.
In the past, viruses have come and gone without worldwide attention. Instant internet worldwide communications could be the cause of the global shutdown. Countries and governors immediately began competing to implement the most overreaching draconian decrees.
Knut Wittkowski, PhD, formerly of the Rockefeller University said social distancing could be making the problem worse. “The problem is if we are artificially keeping the number of infections low among low risk people like school children and their parents we may not have reached herd immunity yet.” “The down side of starting containment, we should not believe that we are more intelligent than mother nature was when we were evolving. Mother Nature (God) was pretty good at making sure that we’re a good match for the diseases that we happen to see virtually every year.”
Some believe America as we know it is gone. They think Trump will allow Dr. Fauci to dictate when and how we reopen America. I think not.
Folks, I cannot believe that God would bring our country back from the brink of destruction (President Hillary), only to leave us. Please allow me to recap……
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/04/trump_pulling_off_the_impossible_again.html
Trump: We Have To Get Our Country Open Again…
‘We will be open again much sooner rather than later’
https://www.weaselzippers.us/446773-trump-we-have-to-get-our-country-open-again/
Testing is revealing the truth that death rates are much lower than model predictions canceling the panic on top of effective treatments.
Sunlight Destroys Virus Quickly, New Govt. Tests Find
Gee, you mean Trump was right?
https://www.weaselzippers.us/447338-sunlight-destroys-virus-quickly-new-govt-tests-find/
Fauci is having way too much fun with this
A virus isn’t as interesting in the lab as it is circulating in the population’s imagination. It’s in Fauci’s interest to keep up the live experiments and people obsess about something that doesn’t have the 100% mortality rate of cancer.
That fascist creep is about as respectable as the virologists who work for regimes in China and Iran.
The Stanford study is highly flawed. I wouldn’t put too much stock in it.
In what way, and with what citations? Otherwise, your response is highly flawed.
Not peer reviewed. Not properly randomized. Testing used not FDA approved. The error rate of the tests is roughly the “signal” they detected.
In other words, it’s a pile of research trash.
Your argument is also partially flawed. What is used as the “control group”? How can it be randomized …comparing testing to not testing? How would you calculate the positive and negative predictive values taking into account the sensitivity and sensitivity of the test? A study on East Coast looking at fecal sampling from sewers also points to same basic result. Of course Stanford is usually a slip-shod institution.
“Sensitivity and specificity “
But testing primarily people with symptoms severe enough to go to the hospital, and use the “case death rate” to make policy decisions is perfectly legit?
That’s pretty stupid too.
I’m inclined to agree with you. I read the abstract and the affiliations of the researchers, which can be found here:
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.14.20062463v1
I’m not sure “a team of Stanford researchers” is a fair representation. Yes, several of them have stanford email addresses. A few are affiliated with odd-sounding institutions.
The subjects for the study were recruited via Facebook. Is that normal practice for a clinical study? It seems to me there would be a high risk of sampling error.
When they “adjusted” the raw results for “zip code, sex, and race/ethnicity”, it almost doubled the prevalence of antibodies.
With only the abstract available, I see some red flags. I haven’t been able to find the whole paper.
It will be interesting to see if the paper survives peer review.
You note correctly that the sampling method was highly flawed, and yet check out all the downvotes you and I have received?
My fellow conservatives are embarrassing me these days.
I think what people are reacting to (re the down votes) is being fed up with the b.s. of the shutdown.
If the virus was TEN times as bad as it is, it sitll would not be any different than any prior flu epidemic, which we’ve all managed to live through SEVERAL of.
This shut-down is a scam aimed at destroying you and I, empowering the left and the Chi-Comms (who own them).
F**king treason.
Hang them all, including pelosi – while she’s eating her twenty tubs of ice cream.
Spot on!
Here’s the lead author’s web page and publication list:
https://profiles.stanford.edu/eran-bendavid?tab=publications
I cannot find the current paper listed, but it’s a long list and I might have missed it.
Read the publication history and his funding sources, and see if you think there’s a political slant.
I found the a link to the full preprint, not just the abstract:
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.14.20062463v1.full.pdf
An associate in the San Francisco area said that her children and their class went to China over Christmas break. They all came back sick. They got their families sick. They got their entire school sick. Everyone got better and no one has gotten the Covid-19 illness. What do you think that means?
Nothing.
The antibody testing will be very important. Until then “true-true and unrelated”.
It is terrifying actually
It means they got a bug like every other family has gotten one in every other flu season when they travel or socialize too much.
I do think their are different strains or rapid morphing of this virus, doesn’t make sense that a young 21 year old healthy nurse can get it and die in a few days and others barley have any symptoms…
I am not psychic, but I have spend my entire adult life as an investigator and analyst. As such, I said two months ago that the assumptions being made about COVID-19 were highly suspect and most likely not valid. I have continually said that the virus will most likely end up resembling H1N1 and have a similar mortality rate. And, I have said that the whole response to the COVID virus was nothing more than a media and politically generated process which did not have anything to do with saving the lives of the populace. Well, guess what? The more data that we get on this virus the more my position is being validated. If the assessment of the Stanford study turn pout to be accurate and we take the lower end of the actual number of COVID infections, 50x the number actually reported, then we end up with a mortality rate of about the same as seasonal flu, without an effective vaccine and therapeutic treatments. And for this we have crippled the entire global economy, probably for the next 3-5 years.
So, what to take away from all of this? Well, either every epidemiologist and medical expert in the world, along with every political leader outside of Sweden, is a total incompetent boob or something else is going on here. Now, if we discount the universal incompetent boob theory, the question then becomes who is really responsible for the draconian response and what is the long term goal or goals? The real damage done by this virus comes, not from the virus itself, but from the ridiculous response to it. Much more damage has been done by shutting down the global and US economies than the small amount of direct human suffering caused by the virus. We have essentially destroyed the savings of a number of individuals and families. Destroyed who knows how many small businesses. Run up a debt which individuals and businesses will be paying off for years and which the US government will never be able to pay off. And essentially made it difficult if not impossible for the economy to recover for years. I also stated that the economy will reopen whenever the populace wishes it to. This is now coming to pass. This who;e fiasco was the result of idiotic actions taken by the media and political leaders. Those responsible should be removed and, possibly, be made to pay for the harm their actions caused. Federal officials, governors, county commissioners, city commissioners, mayors, sheriffs, medical leaders, and the press should all be held accountable for their actions, especially their lies. If you stab the people of the world in the back, then you should pay for it. What has happened is criminal and it should be treated as such. Make those responsible pay for it.
thank you. exactly as I have thought from the beginning. 5 weeks ago, I told my family that I was more afraid of the people REACTING to the virus than the virus itself.
And the perverted MSM MEDIA……….
Perverts, sure.
Traitors, even more so.
Also the “unknown” played a large hand. During the Obama years we lost human intelligence assets in the ground in China…dead and gone. Trusting the CCP and WHO early on was a problem…that painfully was relearned. There was “something missing” early on when I saw this playing out and my main concern was what really was happening in that lab…leaked virulent experiment or bioweapon. With the cover-up we have a better reminder of what the CCP will do to protect and further itself. In the 30’s the debate was whether national or international socialism was the future. With China you have both. Moving toward the Chinese model is a goal of the Left.
The “unknown” is now surfacing as an EXCUSE for the draconian measures instituted world wide. The media used hyped reports to sell the measures necessary to shutdown the Global economy. Whether the release if the virus was intentional [though given the initial damage done to China that is unlikely] or was an accidental release is irrelevant. Never, in modern history the world has NEVER shut down for an infectious disease outbreak, even a pandemic. This whole “crisis” was created by the media and politicians. They knew or sh9uld have known that the “facts” and inferences that they were making from them were false.
If they didn’t understand the power before, they do now. This has been the first “globalist” response as you point out. No checks and balances. “Tincture of time” and a little “benign neglect” can temper ill-advised reactions. It is a Titanic moment…upon seeing the iceberg did they scuttle the ship as the response?
But losing those assets had nothing to do with SECSTATE’s totally unsecure email server that sent every single outgoing email to an unknown overseas email address. Nothing at all to do with that.
Well said Mac!
It’s probably equal to the false positive rate on the test.
Statistics are Newtonian, remember. The error rate is always +/-. For ever false positive, you have to assume that there is a false negative, otherwise no statistical projection is valid. And, the larger the canvased group, the more accurate the statistical assumption will be. While it could turn out that the statistical study does not reflect real world conditions, it is equally likely that it does. How accurately it represents real world conditions will take additional study.
They’re called type 1 and type 2 errors, and there’s no reason they’d be equal or even close. The design of the test takes them into account.
I can give you a cheap test that produces no false negatives: it just says that it’s always positive. Or no false positives – just always say it’s negative.
The design takes into account the cost of each type of error and generally tries to minimize overall error cost, not to make the errors equal.
In fact there’s a nifty and clever stopping rule for sequential tests to get exactly the error rates for each type of error that you want.
Lots of sun, a virus that is asymptomatic for most people (or like a mild to bad cold), I expect many people in the area got it and spread it and now have antibodies.
Trump got bashed for saying this.
He gets ‘bashed’ by people who hate our country and our way of life. And hate us.
Bash away and expose yourselves, you bastards.
South Florida had a very mild winter and near record heat with minimal rain this spring yet it is hot spot for the virus. International travel hub, an older population combined with a large number in overall poor health is a bigger factor than heat, humidity and sunshine.
The combined CV death rate for Dade/Broward/Palm Beach counties is around 70 per million, somewhat high but I wouldn’t call it a “hot spot”. Yes the factors you mention likely make it higher than it would be otherwise. FL as a state is doing pretty well especially considering the number of older retired people throughout the state.
That Fauci guy always looks far too cheerful.
He is living the dream.
This fiasco is like PornHub for epidemiologists.
Never trusted this guy. Not after his gushing over hillary clinton.
If someone gushes over hillary clinton, they are either in on the scam, or they are very naive.
Either way, they can’t be trusted.
As an upper tier government bureaucrat it’s safe bet that anything Fauci says is wrong or self serving and very possibly both
Oh, this “cases” nonsense is the wrong thing to be watching…
— Everybody’s going to be exposed. It’s a highly-contageous respiratory virus.
So, the question is how do we all get the CowPox course of Covid19, innoculating us against the SmallPox course?
— The trick is how to live through exposure.
— And get exposed enough to be “naturally” vaccinated.
The key questions are:
— What helps limit n mitigate the course of the disease once you’re exposed?
— What’s it take to make innoculation robust and durable?
Conveniently, we had, early on a semi-controlled experiment with the Flu Boat qurantine. Some folks died, most didn’t. Many folks showed antibodies, some didn’t. Aside from dying or not; developing antibodies or not, becoming resistant or not, nobody took a look to see *who* died, developed resistance, or neither. What made the difference?
We’ve since had another accidentally controlled experiment on a ship, with similar results, and similar non-investigation.
Meanwhile, testing all the folks in a homeless settlement in Boston showed *most* of them had antibodies, and *none* had symptoms.
So, the govt is all about buying time to “flatten the curve” of *extreme* cases “over-burndening” hospitals.
I’d think buying time is better applied to figure out how to help people *not* land in hospitals, than to spread out the same number landing there.
Greatest frauds in US history:
“Barack Hussein Obama”
Coroniavirus “pandemic”
Bernard Maddoff scandal.
The “Clinton Foundation”
What is most amazing is that ALL these scandals have happened at nearly the same time.
In other words: it has come to the point where our government and our media are COMPLETELY corrupt, and part of the scam.
HEAR HEAR!
IT’S LIKE THE WORLD’S LARGEST ACCOUNTING FRAUD.
So, they’re gonna decide when to “let” us back into living our lives. That is if we fix the transmission rate, develop vaccines, and some number of additional hurdles.
That seems backwards. What do we tolerate having govts for? To fix stuff like this, so get on it.
Where’s a vaccine; now would be good.
Where’s a virus-clearing magic pill for the sick; now would be good.
Were’s a series of well-understood protocols that mitigate once you’re sick; now would be good.
Yeah, I heard. Everybody wear a mask. Fine, where’s the mask dispenser on every corner? I don’t think I’m being unreasonable; they’d have had those tooled up Natl Guard (on their black helicoptors) looting ventilators to drag down-state in what … a couple days?
It’s
I will believe that govt has done some good here when there’s a test gizmo in every pharmacy, grocery store n bar, and stocked N95 mask dispensers on every street corner.
A little less teling people what to do, and a little more doing things for people.
(Not even meeting Barney’s threshold : “Govt is just them word for things we do together.”)
I have to question whether the Stanford study is specific. Is it detecting only antibodies to the present coronavirus, or is it sweeping up some of the other, ubiquitous coronaviruses, as well?
Every year, there are very large numbers of cases of creeping crud, which may be flu or coronavirus or something else, that go undiagnosed. If we’ve already had a series of coronavirus versions of cowpox already, there may be many, many people who have an antibody responses to something that looks like this COVID-19. In my view, that would be consistent with the observation that some people are asymptomatic, or only have very minor symptoms.