The thing is, you don’t have to be an educational expert—certainly, Rand Paul is not—to have some understanding of the effects of closing schools. Fauci has three kids, and probably gets this just as much as Paul does.
While I support some opening, if it’s done cautiously, I think there is some hypocrisy involved. Proponents of opening commonly cite mortality figures that indicate only the old and others with certain conditions are at risk, and “we can protect them.” Protect them how? The only way they can be protected is by continuing to stay at home. IOW, while younger people shouldn’t have to be forced to stay at home for more than a month or two, it’s fine to force that on older people for…how long, six months, a year, till a vaccine is maybe available?
To be fair, most older people are retired, so they don’t have to go to work. But they do have to go out to buy food and for other essential needs. If people think it’s risky now, where maybe on average one in a hundred people is infectious, how much worse will it be when it becomes one in ten, or higher? Some people at the grocery store will for sure be infectious, and an older person knows that if s/he catches the virus, there is about a 10% chance of dying—and a much higher risk of being hospitalized, and if surviving, maybe having serious health effects indefinitely.
Preliminary results of Spain's seroprevalence study suggest ~5% of the population has antibodies, with the most heavily affected provinces at 11-14%.
The 5% figure is about ten times the % of confirmed cases, which is in line with what antibody and other data are suggesting elsewhere. The estimated mortality rate is then about 1.1%, again, within the range, more or less, of what many other studies are suggesting. The sample tested was 60,000, which should result in a very low level of uncertainty, assuming care was taken to ensure randomness (and that the false positive rate was relatively low).
It was also reported that just 26% of the cases were asymptomatic. They must have reached this conclusion from either testing also by PCR and/or (more likely) through questionnaires. This figure, too, is within the general range of what other studies suggest, and also indicates that a lot of people with symptoms are not being tested.
But results from the Stanford study in conjunction with MLB are now in, and only 0.7% were positive:
Researchers received 6,237 completed surveys from employees of 26 clubs. That led to 5,754 samples obtained in the U.S. on April 14 and 15 and 5,603 records that were used. The survey kit had a 0.5% false positive rate.]/quote]
https://www.usatoday.com/story/spor...yees-coronavirus-antibodies-study/3106549001/
The uncertainty in this study was higher--only 60 people actually tested positive, and almost half of them were estimated to be false positives--but clearly the rate was lower than for other studies. One of the study leaders suggests that the players and employees have been particularly careful since spring training began in February-March.
Imagine, though, if this study had come out before the two in CA that claimed as many as 50-85 times as many people had been infected as were confirmed positive tests. What a counterpoint.
By the way, the Stanford study nicely illustrates the difference in value of an antibody test for society vs. for individuals. For society, the results give an indication of how many people have been infected by the virus. The sample might not have been fully random, given it focussed on people associated with MLB. But it did test people from all over the country, which is certainly a major point in its favor. You can't argue that the very low seroprevalence was due to testing people in some area where there have been very few cases.
In fact, you could even argue that focussing on MLB employees was an advantage towards randomness. In most so-called randomly selected antibody tests to date, people volunteer. People are probably more likely to do that if they think they have had the virus, or are at risk for that. In contrast, as i understand it, everyone in MLB was encouraged to volunteer, so people were more motivated by helping the study than learning their status. Also, of course, the fact that the seroprevalence was so low indicates that very few in the study had been infected by the virus, and thus presumably relatively few who had been at risk.
On the other hand, the study has much less value for individuals. Since nearly half the positives were estimated to be false positives, no one who tested positive can have any confidence that s/he really was positive. The people who tested negative, however, can be very certain that they were negative. The false negative rate was about 25%, but that's expressed as a proportion of positives, which was a very small number. As a proportion of all the people who tested negative, the rate of false negatives was < 0.2%.
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