So you are making up your own definition now.
What has been observed is the opposite of what you predicted.
Sorry, youâve completely lost me here. I donât see what âdefinitionsâ have to do with it.
Iâll spell this out as clearly as I possibly can.
- I said that 27 million people have some level of acquired immunity, based on my belief that there has been some low-level exposure over the last few months.
- Therefore, relatively fewer of those 27 million people will be dead of COVID at the end of the pandemic. My prediction was âa few hundredâ.
- The pandemic is far from over.
- Therefore the stats today tell you nothing about what will ultimately happen to 27 million people.
CFR is completely irrelevant. Iâm talking absolute numbers. The final tally.
You are just making it up as you go along arenât you.
Your major predictions were 180 degrees wrong.
There was no mysterious population immunity. The variants present now can spread easily and rapidly. Delta also.
Taiwan has a high CFR which was always likely due to the age profile of the population .
That is to say there is nothing at all unusual about the statistics right now. They follow the usual pattern overseas.
What have I made up now? As usual, Iâm having words put into my mouth and Iâm simply trying to spell out what I actually said. I made no predictions about the CFR trajectory.
You cannot know if there is any population immunity. You will not know until itâs over. What do you believe CFR tells you about immunity? Is it not obvious that the people who are dying are the fraction who do not have immunity? CFR tells you nothing at all about those people who do.
Like the CCP or North Korea with this:
Your argument is an epistemological train derailment Obviously, none of us can really ever know anything. Classic âhow can mirrors be real if our eyes arenât realâ.
Whatâs the point of this conversation? Are we supposed to trust you instead? You havenât really provided any evidence at all that supports the idea of widespread yet undetected COVID infection.
What percentage of the population in Taiwan caught and therefore now are immune to COVID? How did you pick out that spot on the unit-less graph for âwe are hereâ?
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CFR is rubbish to compare with other countries that test way more. Just look at test positivity rate, its way higher than elsewhere. So loads of infections arenât registered, pushing the case fatality rate up.
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I donât think anyone here is even making any attempt to follow what I said. Everything I say is wrong, therefore thereâs no point in reading my posts. Iâll try it again just on the offchance:
- I predicted that, when the dust settles, there will be a few hundred dead.
- I cannot provide âevidenceâ that this will be so. I donât have a time machine. Itâs just my hunch. If you wait a few months, instead of trying to pick out information that isnât there from CDC statistics, we (including me) will know if Iâm right about this.
- If there are only a few hundred dead at that time, it will suggest that there was indeed some immunity here in Taiwan.
How on earth should I know? My point was that it is not something that can be determined except by allowing everyone to be exposed to the virus - which will inevitably happen, lockdowns or no - and see how many people wind up dead.
Itâs a Gompertz curve. Every epidemic follows the same shape. The differential of the Gompertz curve is what youâll generally see for daily deaths.
Iâm suggesting weâre somewhere at the beginning of the curve, which, I would have thought, is not something that is a matter of debate. But it seems absolutely everything I say is a matter of debate. If you think weâre somewhere else, feel free to move the blue line somewhere else.
Youâve absolutely no evidence for that. The simple and more obvious explanation is that Taiwan and places such as Wanhua hve a lot of older people packed together. Besides Taiwan has good contact tracing and does not seem to have widespread community spread . They are actually MORE likely to pick up cases here.
Thatâs funny because you are always accusing everybody else as being wrong.
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Yikes - you are going to get a hard disagree from me there. You are acting like there is a single dependent variable that this all hinges on â if for whatever reason there are only a few hundred dead, you would be vindicated. I donât get how you can be so fluent with the syntax of science but so callous and flippant with the application. Start with the data and draw conclusions from that. Normally, Iâd say you were just looking for data which supports your hypothesis, but you werenât even able to find any data; itâs a âhunchâ and âthere arenât any statisticsâ. How can you say there are no statistics?
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Why do you think there is already data that supports or disproves my hypothesis? How is this physically possible at this point in time?
Iâm making a statement about the end - the flat section - of the Gompertz curve. We are not there yet (unless you think we are?). Therefore no data exists. Whatâs the point in looking for something that cannot possibly be known?
To be clear: I am not attempting to say anything about CFR. Iâm making a statement about people who cannot become seriously ill over the next few months - that is, until the vaccine programme (if it ever happens) takes off and messes with my theory. Obviously, if people are vaccinated, then you can no longer draw conclusions about natural immunity.
I know some people will argue that, if the curve tails off, itâs because weâve âsuccessfully contained the virusâ. When it happens, there might be some data available that supports or disproves that conclusion. For example the CDC might, by that point, have started random testing (or collecting data from home tests) showing seroprevalence in the population-at-large. That would give us some limited idea (an underestimate) of how many people have been exposed and shrugged it off. Unfortunately, they seem to have no inclination to do this, so we may be forever in the dark.
There is one small hint from the current CDC strategy that I might be right. Because testing is very narrowly focused on âsuspectsâ (ie., people who have probably been exposed to the virus), that means weâve got some idea of the number of people who could have been infected, and yet were not. Well: 2.3 million tests have been conducted, and yet weâve only had 15,000 confirmed cases. Thatâs an extraordinarily low number considering that tests are directed against people suspected to have been near a COVID-positive individual. Even if we assume 99% of those test subjects were not at any risk (ie., they were contact-traced merely as a precaution, and never actually came within sneezing distance of the known positive person), itâs still a low number, suggesting âRâ somewhere around 1. One possible explanation is that a lot of people are already immune.
test positivity rate in Taiwan is way higher than in Europe. The only other reason for the high CFR was of course the high average age in the first clusters.
It was exactly the same in Europe early on - very high CFR - then they started testing more and more and the CFR only went down and down.
And the current CFR is not based on good contract tracing now - that may well be true - but reflects the contract tracing 4-6 weeks ago. I can believe that right now contact tracing is getting back in order - but it was out of control 4-8 weeks ago leading to the spike in cases.
I am very sure 6 weeks ago they only had 1 out of 10 people tested positive, who was actually positive. That the numbers go down right now absolutely shows that Taiwan is less suspectible to Covid19 than Europe. Cause lockdown is less severe than it was in parts of Europe with numbers going down rapidly.
As soon as the summer is over - cases gonna be 0 again - itâs no coincidence for me at all that it started spreading right in time with the summer heat arriving and everyone being inside with AC. Taiwan can be compared to Norway or Finland (and Vitamin D levels are comparable too). It simply started spreading because covid19 variants now are more contagious than the ones before.
Also look at the CFR before the current outbreak - it was rather low. The now high CFR just shows that it spread some months out of control, out of tests.
Oh I see.
You are SURE.
You arenât just MAKING UP these numbers off the top of your head.
Itâs much more likely my explanation above is correct.
Late August 2020, COVID has been wrecking shit around the world for a good six months. A diverse team of scientists collaborate and test 10,000 people in Taiwan for COVID antibodies. They find a grand total of four people that slipped through the cracks. You are ignoring actual peer-reviewed science for your conspiracy theories, again.
To be clear: I am not attempting to say anything about CFR. Iâm making a statement about people who cannot become seriously ill over the next few months.
My dude, these two statistics are intrinsically linked. Your claim hinges on the fact that many cases are going undetected; thus, the CFR would be lower than it appears.
Most reasonable estimates put the herd immunity threshold at 50-70%. How on earth did millions and millions of Taiwanese people catch COVID, show no symptoms, successfully transmit it, etc, without anyone catching on? Its not like COVID deaths were passed off as flu deaths⌠we went from ~1000 severe flu cases and ~160 deaths seasonally to 1 severe flu case and 0 deaths.
How did all these people catch COVID with no one noticing?
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I know. That outcome proves that they did not have a measurable antibody concentration. It does not mean they were never exposed to SARS-CoV-2, nor does it mean that they had not developed a useful immune response.
Why do you think this? Pretend Iâm stupid and explain the math to me.
No. That is absolutely not what Iâm claiming. Iâm saying those cases simply arenât there. âImmunityâ means either that you only get mildly sick, or that you donât get sick at all. Your immune system screens out the virus at the first hurdle.
You are immune to all sorts of things. You donât walk around with a collection of low-grade infections all the time. You simply do not get sick.
They didnât. I said they were exposed to the virus, not that they âcaught COVIDâ. You do not need to become sick to develop immunity. In fact itâs better that you donât: thatâs the whole principle behind (some types of) vaccine.
Anyway, this is all purely academic. All we need to do is wait and see what happens.
Iâm sure scientists worldwide would love to meet all these people with no detectable antibodies that are also immune and able to fight off the virus, without even showing any symptoms. You need to develop antibodies to develop immunity, or do you have another world-shattering theory that debunks all current epidemiology as we know it?
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Utter waffle
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Look, if you want to argue over this, at least go and learn how your immune system works. I donât pretend to be an expert, but I do at least know the basics.
Antibodies do the heavy lifting before a virus can even enter a cell. The reason is obvious: once a cell is infected, it starts spewing virus copies and the only recourse that your body has is to destroy that cell. Once your body has no further need of antibodies for any particular pathogen, they tend to disappear and will eventually become undetectable. However, your body retains a âmemoryâ of how to reconstruct them should it ever become necessary.
@Brianjones: If you know better, then explain where Iâve got it wrong.
He says we need to wait for some undetermined time in the future when the âstatisticsâ will suddenly be clear . But not nowâŚBecause now and any time throughout the last year doesnât agree with his prediction, coincidentally.