German study shows COVID-19 might not be fatal as previously thought

[timendres]

New research by Bonn University in Germany is suggesting that the morality rate of COVID-19 may be well under 0.5% - in this study, the rate was 0.37%. It also suggests, like the study of the COVID-19 infected US naval ship showing 60% being asymptomatic, that 15% of the population never knew they had the virus. The study's results are presented on CNBC by a professor of virology at Bonn University here:

   

 

 

Mods: I am still not clear on the rules of posting YT videos here, so I apologize if this link is violating some rule. But I thought this information was very important.

 

[jmccarty]

A lot being learned now.  Some populations no more effect than a summer above 40C for 2 weeks.

[uhuh]

17 minutes ago, jmccarty said:

A lot being learned now.  Some populations no more effect than a summer above 40C for 2 weeks.

I suggest you spend the next 2 weeks in NYC.

[CLS]

I read this German report a week ago. The most important takeaway was that if you inhale only a low dose of the virus your symptoms will be less severe than with a high dose. 

[ukrules]

I've been reading about multiple different antibody sampling tests over the last few weeks and they all suggest a reasonably high amount of spread between people who had no idea they've had COVID at all.

 

In the UK Professor Karol Sikora ordered a bunch of antibody tests for the staff at the cancer treatment facility (Rutherford Cancer Center) where he works as Chief Medical Officer.

 

He found that 7.4 percent of the staff have antibodies to COVID but he's pretty certain that many more have also beat off COVID with other immune system mechanisms without antibodies being created. In other words, their existing immune system handled it no problem.

 

Source : https://www.hospitaltimes.co.uk/testing-is-the-key-to-defeating-this-pandemic/

 

Also look up the guy on Twitter if you're interested, he's an interesting source of non hyped information inside the health system.

[Name Display]

1 hour ago, uhuh said:

I suggest you spend the next 2 weeks in NYC.

The deaths attributed to CV in new york state are approaching 1000 per million.

Statistically around 9000 per million people die each year in the whole USA.

The CDC and Fauci/Birx state that the counting of corona deaths is "died with" or probable and not "because of" and it is recommended to be "assumed" if thought to be appropriate.

 

Also noteworthy is that since the corona deaths rose the flu related deaths dropped. All this was reported by Fauci/Birx in a White House briefing a few days ago.

 

So it rather looks like a pandemic amplified by a statistical effect than a mass death or a dramatically increased mortality.

I would be more afraid to be in NYC because of people behaving unreasonable than because of the CV.

 

Edited April 20, 2020 by Name Display

[dimitriv]

56 minutes ago, ukrules said:

He found that 7.4 percent of the staff have antibodies to COVID

 

The numbers are different everywhere.

 

In NL the organization where you can donate blood said that 3% of the blood they received contained antibodies.

 

About 3750 people died till now in NL. With an infection rate of 100% the number of deaths would rise to 125.000. That is 0.8 % of the population.

 

Some people say that the number of deaths is perhaps twice as high, because only people who have been tested and die are counted. If you die without a positive test, it is not counted.

 

 

[yuyiinthesky]

This German study is supported by a study of Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine at Stanford University, and others, in Santa Clara County, California. The  study was released Friday in preprint: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.14.20062463v1.full.pdf

 

Quote

"We found that there are many, many unidentified cases of people having Covid infection that were never identified with it with a virus test," said Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine at Stanford University and one of the paper's authors. "It's consistent with findings from around the world that this disease, this epidemic is further along than we thought."

The study estimated that 2.49% to 4.16% of people in Santa Clara Country had been infected with Covid-19 by April 1. This represents between 48,000 and 81,000 people, which is 50 to 85 times what county officials recorded by that date: 956 confirmed cases.

In summary, the real number of infections there turned out to be 50 to 85 times higher than the positive tests in that area! Which pushes down the the mortality rate massively.

Very interesting that these experts find independently similar results on 2 places so far away from each other, on the other side of the globe.

[yuyiinthesky]

21 minutes ago, dimitriv said:

With an infection rate of 100% the number of deaths would rise to 125.000. That is 0.8 % of the population.

This is not how it works.
1) The SARS-CoV-2 virus cannot infect 100%, it can reach about 60 - 70 %.
2) With the number of infections magnitudes higher than previously thought, the real death rate of SARS-CoV-2 has to be recalculated and is much lower than previously thought.

Which might be a part of the reason why the death rate in Thailand is so low.

[ukrules]

47 minutes ago, dimitriv said:

About 3750 people died till now in NL. With an infection rate of 100% the number of deaths would rise to 125.000. That is 0.8 % of the population.

There is another important factor which can't really be measured, there's people who've managed to beat this COVID virus without making antibodies. We know they exist because some of them have been tested positive during contact tracing / hospital visits, yet they don't have antibodies after recovery. Remember, most people don't appear to be made very ill at all so many will not know they've been infected, if they make no antibodies then they will never know.

 

This might turn out to be a very small number of people, or maybe not.

 

This unknown measurement is the source of media stories about reinfection and some hysterical claims about antibodies being useless because 'there's proof' that some people can be reinfected.

 

Professor Karol Sikora said this on Twitter about people who don't have antibodies after an infection "Many others will be fighting off the virus with other mechanisms. Perhaps secretory IgA responses in mucous membranes or cellular effectors such as natural killer (N-K) or T cells."

 

I have a feeling that these are the people who shake it off like a run of the mill cold.

Edited April 20, 2020 by ukrules

[rabang]

As many people have suggested air pollution seems to be a contributing factor. Not a good sign for Thailand on the other hand. I had a constant mild dry cough and an itchy throat there. It's great to be able to breath pure air now.

 

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/apr/20/air-pollution-may-be-key-contributor-to-covid-19-deaths-study

[timendres]

The other thing I find interesting about this video is Mr. Gates popping up, yet again, repeating the mantra that "life cannot go back to normal without a vaccine". Really? It seems to me that Mr. Gates is h3ll bent on becoming "The Man Who Cured COVID-19". If life goes back to normal, and COVID-19 turns out to be another, possibly a bit nastier, influenza that does not require a vaccine for life to go back to normal, then he becomes just another lunatic in a long line of muppets.

[timendres]

4 minutes ago, rabang said:

As many people have suggested air pollution seems to be a contributing factor. Not a good sign for Thailand on the other hand. I had a constant mild dry cough and an itchy throat there. It's great to be able to breath pure air now.

 

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/apr/20/air-pollution-may-be-key-contributor-to-covid-19-deaths-study

And if Thailand's mortality rate remains a record setting low?

[chessman]

It seems odd to me, In Germany about 11 out of 12 tests for the Coronavirus are negative and yet they are vastly underestimating the number of cases. Something fishy there.

[Monomial]

51 minutes ago, yuyiinthesky said:

This is not how it works.
1) The SARS-CoV-2 virus cannot infect 100%, it can reach about 60 - 70 %.
2) With the number of infections magnitudes higher than previously thought, the real death rate of SARS-CoV-2 has to be recalculated and is much lower than previously thought.

Which might be a part of the reason why the death rate in Thailand is so low.

 

Explain mathematically or logically using mathematical heuristics why it can not infect 100%? That statement when not accompanied by any kind of mathematical proof is absurd. It sounds like you are simply repeating something that you only heard a piece of and are leaving out the proper context.

 

I would be very interested to know the specifics of the model that led you to that statement.

 

[Monomial]

10 minutes ago, chessman said:

It seems odd to me, In Germany about 11 out of 12 tests for the Coronavirus are negative and yet they are vastly underestimating the number of cases. Something fishy there.

 

Are you talking tests for coronavirus, or tests for coronavirus antibodies?

 

Pure speculation with no other data: It could be nobody tests positive for coronavirus in Germany because they have all already been infected and recovered. In that case, the number of cases should be near 100% of the population, but because they were not tested when the disease was active they were never noticed, thus drastically underreported.

 

As for the antibody test, there is still much concern that the tests don't capture everyone who has already been exposed. I'll admit to not having researched this very much yet, as the tests themselves are so new and shrouded in proprietary intellectual property. It is all this uncertainty surrounding these anomolies in the data and testing which makes this so frustrating to anyone trying to understand what is actually happening.

 

The only facts I know absolutely for sure are 1) some people do die from the virus, and the cytokine storm that destroys your lungs and organs is truly nasty, and 2) that the global depression they have induced in order to try and stop this is going to kill people just as surely as the virus does.  Beyond that, I trust very little from anyone any more. Nobody is producing anything that is clearly a reliable model or even reliable raw data, and everything is hidden in cloaks of secrecy.

 

 

[yuyiinthesky]

15 minutes ago, chessman said:

t seems odd to me, In Germany about 11 out of 12 tests for the Coronavirus are negative and yet they are vastly underestimating the number of cases. Something fishy there.

not really, the test you mention here are positive for someone having a fresh infection, not for someone having had an infection. They are only positive for a short time window, one or 2 or 3 weeks.

The antibody tests in these studies are positive only after that, when you had the infection, and your immune system kicked it out.

So the case numbers are much higher, but the good news is that these cases are recovered cases, not sick anymore.

[yuyiinthesky]

11 minutes ago, Monomial said:

Explain mathematically or logically using mathematical heuristics why it can not infect 100%?

Have a look at any explanation of herd immunity. Once the virus runs out of candidates to infect, it runs out. That is happening when every infected person infects less than 1 uninfected person.

The herd immunity value is different for every virus depending on how contagious the virus is, the R₀ value. For SARS-CoV-2 the herd immunity level seems to be 60-70%.

 

 

Quote

R₀, pronounced “R naught,” is a mathematical term that indicates how contagious an infectious disease is. It’s also referred to as the reproduction number. As an infection is transmitted to new people, it reproduces itself.

R₀ tells you the average number of people who will contract a contagious disease from one person with that disease. It specifically applies to a population of people who were previously free of infection and haven’t been vaccinated.

For example, if a disease has an R₀ of 18, a person who has the disease will transmit it to an average of 18 other people. That replication will continue if no one has been vaccinated against the disease or is already immune to it in their community.

 

What do R0 values mean?

Three possibilities exist for the potential transmission or decline of a disease, depending on its R₀ value:

• If R₀ is less than 1, each existing infection causes less than one new infection. In this case, the disease will decline and eventually die out.
• If R₀ equals 1, each existing infection causes one new infection. The disease will stay alive and stable, but there won’t be an outbreak or an epidemic.
• If R₀ is more than 1, each existing infection causes more than one new infection. The disease will be transmitted between people, and there may be an outbreak or epidemic.

Importantly, a disease’s R₀ value only applies when everyone in a population is completely vulnerable to the disease. This means:

• no one has been vaccinated
• no one has had the disease before
• there’s no way to control the spread of the disease

 

 

(from https://www.healthline.com/health/r-nought-reproduction-number)

 

Quote

Researchers think that the R0 for COVID-19 is between 2 and 3. This means that one person can infect two to three other people. It also means 50% to 67% of the population would need to be resistant before herd immunity kicks in and the infection rates start to go down.

(from https://www.webmd.com/lung/what-is-herd-immunity#1)

In short, the effective contagiousness of a virus sinks when too many had the disease already, and the "disease will decline and eventually die out". It cannot reach 100%.

[baansgr]

I wish we had a few members on TV that work in hospitols in Spain, Italy and UK.

[chessman]

34 minutes ago, yuyiinthesky said:

not really, the test you mention here are positive for someone having a fresh infection, not for someone having had an infection. They are only positive for a short time window, one or 2 or 3 weeks.

The antibody tests in these studies are positive only after that, when you had the infection, and your immune system kicked it out.

So the case numbers are much higher, but the good news is that these cases are recovered cases, not sick anymore.

I understand that, I’m not saying it is impossible but it seems strange to me.

 

If you use the figures from the OP, 0.38% mortality rate and 4700 dead in Germany ... that would mean there were about 1,150,000 cases - that’s a million more than reported. OK, everyone knows the real number is higher than the reported number. Let’s accept that for now.
 

But in Germany 11 out of 12 of the traditional tests are negative. A lot of tests are for people who show symptoms or have a link with somebody who is positive. It’s difficult for me to align these two things. If the virus was much more widespread than thought you would expect less negative tests.

 

Could there be issues with these antibody tests? (or the traditional tests?)

Edited April 20, 2020 by chessman

[chessman]

4 minutes ago, baansgr said:

I wish we had a few members on TV that work in hospitols in Spain, Italy and UK.

What would you ask them? There was a very interesting New York Times podcast interviewing a doctor from Italy in one of the worst hit regions. 

[thaibeachlovers]

5 hours ago, uhuh said:

I suggest you spend the next 2 weeks in NYC.

If we have learned anything from the current situation, it is that living in crowded cities is not such a good idea after all.

 

No doubt those invested in the Corona "crisis" will be poo pooing any studies that cast doubt on the scenario of doom.

There is going to be doom for millions, caused by government actions. Australia seems to be doing just fine, despite not acting like it's the end of the world to allow some lee way in economic activity. If Sweden holds to its present course they may come out of this a lot better off than other countries.

[timendres]

1 hour ago, Monomial said:

Explain mathematically or logically using mathematical heuristics why it can not infect 100%? That statement when not accompanied by any kind of mathematical proof is absurd. It sounds like you are simply repeating something that you only heard a piece of and are leaving out the proper context.

Very good explanation here:

 

 

As more people are infected, and become immune, it begins to "firewall" the virus. This is one of the reasons (aside from the load on the healthcare system) to "flatten the curve", since this provides time for these firewalls to develop.

Edited April 20, 2020 by timendres

[thaibeachlovers]

1 hour ago, Monomial said:

that the global depression they have induced in order to try and stop this is going to kill people just as surely as the virus does.

True. IMO it will destroy more lives than the virus would. Unemployment affects everyone in a family, leads to shops closing when few have enough money to buy more than essentials, and destroys communities, increases crime etc.

[sirineou]

1 hour ago, Monomial said:

 

Explain mathematically or logically using mathematical heuristics why it can not infect 100%? That statement when not accompanied by any kind of mathematical proof is absurd. It sounds like you are simply repeating something that you only heard a piece of and are leaving out the proper context.

 

I would be very interested to know the specifics of the model that led you to that statement.

 

The virus need hosts without immunity to replicate, as more and more get infected so does the available pool of hosts diminishes. 0nce a large percentage of the population has being infected and developed immunity the remaining small percentage of uninfected hosts will be difficult for the virus to find. At some point there will be a small percentage of carriers and a small percentage of hosts and a limited time for those carriers to find the hosts. 

In short, It will be close to impossible  for the last contagious person to find the last available host

So the virus will burn out before it reaches 100%. 

 

[cornishcarlos]

Any report that shows the virus to be less deadly than the Bubonic plague, will be shot down... People won't be scared anymore and might start questioning things, like over inflated numbers (mortality numbers) and lock down policies.. Better to discredit anything that goes against the grain !! 

 

[Monomial]

18 minutes ago, sirineou said:

The virus need hosts without immunity to replicate, as more and more get infected so does the available pool of hosts diminishes. 0nce a large percentage of the population has being infected and developed immunity the remaining small percentage of uninfected hosts will be difficult for the virus to find. At some point there will be a small percentage of carriers and a small percentage of hosts and a limited time for those carriers to find the hosts. 

In short, It will be close to impossible  for the last contagious person to find the last available host

So the virus will burn out before it reaches 100%. 

 

Sure. However 60% is way too small a number. With so many asymptomatic carriers the number approaches 95%.

 

Show the math you are using.

 

[chessman]

4 minutes ago, cornishcarlos said:

Any report that shows the virus to be less deadly than the Bubonic plague, will be shot down... People won't be scared anymore and might start questioning things, like over inflated numbers (mortality numbers) and lock down policies.. Better to discredit anything that goes against the grain !! 

An odd statement. Is any media saying it will be that bad? Mortality numbers are sadly underestimated (not inflated at all) but that seems well known. Most media is constantly talking about lock down policies and the best way to lift them. If the media you are consuming is not, why not change?

[Relocated]

6 hours ago, uhuh said:

These are not "results of a study".

These are a concoction of some very preliminary findings,  not published anywhere, not peer-reviewed. 

I trust concoction more than liberal media. Are you blaming me for any reason?

[thaibeachlovers]

18 minutes ago, chessman said:

An odd statement. Is any media saying it will be that bad? Mortality numbers are sadly underestimated (not inflated at all) but that seems well known. Most media is constantly talking about lock down policies and the best way to lift them. If the media you are consuming is not, why not change?

LOL. Our <deleted> media apparently repeat vebatim the government line that it is the worst thing that has ever happened in our lifetime. I say apparently as I stopped watching/ listening to the MSM long ago given how useless it is.

However, the facts that are available to me do not support the draconian actions that have been taken. Far as I can see the only country doing it ( IMO ) right is Sweden.

The aftermath is going to be very interesting when government actions are examined by independent bodies and truth comes out.