For your first part, maybe you can explain your reasoning. What’s to prevent a New Yorker from going to Detroit?
For the second part, you’re off by orders of magnitude. NY has had 400,000 cases out of a population of 19.45 million, or 2%, so not even close to a majority, let alone the great majority. I’m not really sure how you could be this far off – are you following the news of this pandemic much?
Nationwide, we’re right about 1% of the population infected.
Those are confirmed cases. It is suspected that a great many more were exposed to the virus, though I haven’t seen any projections that indicate it was a majority of New Yorkers, much less a ‘great’ majority. The most I’ve seen was something like 20-30% maybe, though we’ll never know for certain.
That’s true, and yet another problem that the US has had with this pandemic – our level of testing is awful.
The other issue, of course, is that it’s not even clear that having had the disease gives you lasting immunity.
The rest of the country, by reopening too early (or never shutting down) is going to undo all the work that NY and NJ did early on. Extremely frustrating.
I saw some articles recently about large parts of Queens that show 50+ percent of people with antibodies. And then a fair amount of stories about people potentially having some kind of innate defenses that won’t result in their showing antibodies. It’s not hard to model it up to where the virus kills one in a thousand in a population it exposes itself to fully, which would put NYC at around 20,000 deaths for 20 million people?
(1) Define “large” parts of Queens.
(2) Queens is not the entirety of New York
But did they really do all that work? Or did the virus just do its thing there? Given everything I’m seeing now, I’m kinda finding it hard to believe that the population of New York City managed to follow all the protocols and keep 90% of people unexposed.
I think I was going off this article:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/09/nyregion/nyc-coronavirus-antibodies.html
What the actual fuck? NY and NJ shut down hard. I’ve been working from home since mid March (I work in NYC and live in NJ). My whole company sent nearly everyone home by the end of March. Nearly everyone I know personally, and every person I know from my suburban NJ neighborhood has been working from home for months. Every bar and restaurant closed, and only started allowing outdoor service recently. We still don’t have indoor service. Every gym is closed, every movie theater. Hair cutting places, nail salons, etc., only just reopened, and they have strict distance guidelines, with plexi-glass between the customer and the service provider.
If I want to go to the dentist, I wait in my car until they’re ready for me, then they take my temperature, give me two different medicated mouthwashes, hairnet, booties, new mask (only to be taken off when I’m in the chair).
Every day, there’s a line to get into Trader Joe’s because they operate at a very limited capacity. Masks are required inside any store.
Jesus. You really need to read up on this.
Corona is a small working-class part of Queens, just one neighborhood of many. Working-class people have not been able to shut down, since their jobs typically require more hand-on work. That’s why black and Latino deaths have been so much higher than other ethnic groups.
It’s in the article. First paragraph, actually - while a few clinics showed antibody response in a majority of people, another in Brooklyn saw it in 13%.
Later on, it states overall city statistics of 26%. Hardly a majority, except in certain areas of the city. And the numbers are highly correlated with working class areas of the city, i.e. people who had to go out to work and couldn’t stay at home.
But if 26% have antibodies, does it not stand to reason that greater than 26% have been exposed?
More than 26%, maybe but not for certain.
For one, the antibody tests, especially at the time, were known to be more error prone than we’d like, with a relatively high false positive rate, i.e. if you are getting 26% positive antibody detection, it’s likely that the actual number is lower.
Another is how you define ‘exposure’. If you mean ‘been “near” (however we define near) somebody who has contracted COVID-19’, sure it’s quite possible it’s a majority. But that counts for all of us right now. If ‘exposure’ is defined as getting enough of a viral load to ‘catch’ the disease, then it’s probably not.
So those factors suggest the true rate is smaller. But an innate response that doesn’t produce antibodies suggests the true rate is larger, and perhaps significantly more so. In other words, both those scenarios could be true at the same time.
I think the false positive rate is something like 50%(!). I’ll see if I can track down a cite.
Here’s one: Beware of False-Positive Results with SARS-CoV-2 Antibody Tests | AAFP
With the Cellex test, with a specificity of 96%, if 1% of the population actually has it (where we are in the US), the false positive rate is 80%.
I don’t know how to adjust this for a community that has a positive rate of, say, 20% – does that mean look at the 20% line, and get a false positive rate of 14%? Or, adjust the 20% down to the more likely actual positive rate and then look at the line? Seems recursive.
I saw that same article, but I can’t tell how randomized those samples were. Some of the information is from people who come into clinics. One doctor sent out tests to people and the results were that 26% came back positive. In certain areas, 35% of tests came back positive. So, let’s say that a hard hit area like Queens has 35% people infected. Right now, Queens already has 7,000 dead so you’ll get almost double that in Queens alone. The hospitalization rate is three times the death rate. These are tough numbers even if cut in half.
https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-data-boroughs.page
Well, no. It doesn’t suggest it is larger. It means it is possible it may be larger. There’s no conclusive or even suggestive evidence for it. So the suggestion that a majority of New Yorkers have been exposed is certainly premature. As the article itself explains, there’s a reticence to act as if they had, in case of error, and I wouldn’t want to make that assumption either.
Also, the experts don’t seem to act as if it is the case, and I’d rather defer to their judgment. An error underestimating it is, in this case, vastly safer and preferable than overestimating it.
You need data to support that supposition. There is no data or evidence to suggest that a majority of people in New York have been exposed to the virus. The number of people who were infected was indeed substantial. There have been more than 545000 confirmed cases, and estimates are that the number could be as high as 10 times that number in the Greater New York City metropolitan area, which would mean that about 5 million or so may have been exposed since the beginning of the year. The total population in greater NYC is around 20-22 million, which would mean that perhaps 1/4 of the population has been infected, which is a substantial number, but not enough to achieve herd immunity, and we don’t know how long immunity lasts.
And this only pertains to New York, which is not even 10% of our country’s population. We’re a long way from being done with COVID. It has a lot of our population left to burn through if we don’t take corrective action soon. The fall is when epidemiologists fear that the ‘burn’ I refer to could begin to take place. If we’re lucky, COVID becomes less infectious and we have a mild flu season. But again, for the less severe scenario to unfold, we’re relying on luck - good fortune that we don’t seem to have had up to this point. Seems foolish to just hope we luck out now.
The data linked above by Tfletch1 would seem to suggest that either there was a profound change in people getting exposed to the virus or the virus ran out of people to expose. I don’t think either one of us will be able, anytime soon at least, to prove either ‘supposition’.
I’m from Queens, something I used to be more proud of, and I can confirm that Corona and even Jackson Heights are not large parts of it. Maybe large parts are affected, but that article doesn’t say so.
Are they small like a couple square blocks? If they are sizeable enough areas on their own, and their inhabitants have been able to freely move in and out of the rest of Queens, then it’s just hard to imagine how the virus could run rampant in some parts of such an urban area and leave the rest alone.
Florida’s death rate has been trending up since July 1, and hit a new record just today,July 14. I predict that the 7 day trend line will continue to rise.
Texas? 7 day average up every day since July 4. 4th highest numbers today.
Arizona? 7 day average hit another record today. Again.
This is just going to continue. Has the OP been answered yet? Is anyone surprised?