Way to slide in the Trump bashing with the Time article. Sad!
I didn't "slide" it in. I linked it because it was very relevant to how the pandemic is occurring in the U.S.
As I've pointed out several times before, there is no way we can adequately discuss the pandemic without referring to politics. We've had a lot of discussion here of Sweden. The situation there is very much the result of politics. Did you ever complain about that? I recently posted that Iceland will soon allow foreign visitors. That's a political decision. Did you complain about that? I pointed out how S. Korea used contact tracing to determine the cause of its recent surge of cases. That was a political decision. There really is no way we can discuss any country's response without involving politics. I suppose we could simply state what the country is doing, without expressing an opinion, but then we couldn't discuss the future at all.
A major study of antibody testing was recently published in the Netherlands, and people who want to end the lockdowns are using it to make their case. So it’s worth looking at it in detail.
https://esb.nu/blog/20059695/we-kunnen-nu-gaan-rekenen-aan-corona
Here are the seroprevalence data, from Sanquin Research (age group/positives/people tested/% positive):
18-30 25/688/3.6%
31-40 17/494/3.5%
41-50 26/752/3.4%
51-60 38/1234/3.1%
61-70 29/1030/2.8%
71-80 0/10
Total: 135/4208 (3.2%)
So about 3% of the population has been infected (a little higher if one takes into account some currently infected people would not have made antibodies yet). The seroprevalence was then combined with data from some other studies which correlate the number of people in age group, the number hospitalized, the number in ICU, and the number of deaths. Here’s where they don’t explain themselves very well. I don’t understand Dutch, and have to use a translator, but even so, the table they post is not at all clear. They list under what translates as “number infected” some numbers, mostly in the 70,000s, but the last around 58,000. These numbers are intended to be the number of people in each age group who are seropositive—that’s clear from the way they use these numbers subsequently--but the way to determine this would be to multiply the total number of people in each age group in the entire country by the seropositivity of that age group. When you do that, using Dutch demographic data, those numbers are not what you get. Some of them are close, but there is definitely something missing here.
Anyway, below I have summarized their findings as age group/total infected/confirmed cases/deaths. Note that the ratio of seropositives to confirmed cases is very high, more than twenty-fold overall, and much higher for some age groups. This is higher than other studies have found, a point I will return to later:
20-29 79,200/2155/3
30-39 71,400/2309/5
40-49 78,750/3049/11
50-59 77,500/5028/80
60-69 58,520/3921/288
20-69 365,370/16,462/387
The mortality rates for each age group can then be calculated by dividing the actual number of deaths by the estimated number of infected people—e.g., for 20-29, 3/79,200:
20-29 .004%
30-39 .007%
40-49 .014%
50-59 .103%
60-69 .492%
I was somewhat surprised by these results, because they are quite different from what I calculated for NY City, based on their antibody tests (the values in parenthesis are the roughly equivalent figures from the Netherlands data):
18-44: 0.065% (.009%)
45-64: 0.365% (.128%)
65-74: 1.18% (1.22%)
75-: 2.58% (6.13%)
The Dutch data indicate that younger people are at much less risk than those in NYC, while the oldest are at higher risk. This is the key conclusion that lockdown opponents are emphasizing.
The authors continue by comparing these mortality rates with normal mortality rates, by all other causes, and come to this conclusion:
The chance of dying from corona is less than the 'normal' chance of dying. In that sense, the risks of corona are low, especially for people under 60. And under 50, the chance of IC recording is also very small, and so the potential load on the Ic's from that group is also small.
Moreover, the opportunities depend heavily on underlying diseases. Of the 387 deaths in these age groups of 20 to 70, at least 70 percent had pre-existing conditions, such as diabetes, heart disease, cancer or other conditions. For those who do not have such a disease, the risks are therefore significantly lower, and for those who do, the risks are considerably higher.
Whether you find the risks high or low or acceptable is of course a personal consideration. But I imagine people and organisations in this view seeing arguments for reopening in control, starting with healthy people under 55 who also do not live with vulnerable people.
A second antibody study, referred to as Pienter, was also conducted by the Dutch. Though the sample size tested was somewhat smaller (2800 vs. 4000 for the Sanquin study), and the age ranges were narrower, the overall results were very similar. These are the mortality rates determined by the Pienter study:
0-19 0.003%
20-29 0.003%
30-39 0.008%
40-49 0.017%
50-54 .058%
55-59 .146%
60-64 .290%
65-69 .767%
70-74 1.668%
75-79 4.433%
80-85 7.836%
In some respects, these conclusions are not new. One of the earliest studies of the risk of C19 with age, conducted by the Chinese back in February, came to a similar conclusion, that risk of death was relatively low until age 70 or so. And subsequent studies, particularly in Italy, revealed how certain other conditions were also a risk factor.
But this study claims that almost no one under age 60 is at risk any more than would be the case for seasonal flu, which is somewhat at odds with the NYC data. There are potential problems with all antibody tests, of course, including false positives and non-random selection processes. In the case of NYC, we know that false positives were not a major contributor, because the upstate results showed a much lower prevalence.
As I noted earlier, the Netherlands studies found that seroprevalence was about 20 times higher than the number of confirmed cases. Other studies—NYC, for example, Spain, and a study of a German town--have found ratios about half of this. But this still doesn’t entirely reconcile the discrepancy, especially since the differences go in different directions with different ages. There are many other possible factors, of course. The Dutch studies reported fairly low absolute numbers, and per age group, the numbers are very low, so there would be a high degree of uncertainty, which wasn't given in the blog post. But the medical system in the Netherlands would not, I think, be all that different from that in the U.S., in the matter of preventing or minimizing deaths, for example. The cases/million and deaths/millions for the two countries are very roughly similar.
The bottom line, though, is if you rationalize opening up on the grounds that younger people have a very low risk of death, you're basically giving up on any notion of containing the virus, and just letting it spread till (maybe) herd immunity is reached. All the vulnerable people have to remain in lockdown until then or until a vaccine is available. The longer the spread continues, the greater the risk of contagion, and thus death, for the vulnerable population.
Or as this writer puts it:
https://medium.com/@timjwise/ten-questions-for-those-opposed-to-lockdowns-6979f0c15049
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