Replies to post #231083 on Biotech Values

[n4807g]

If accurate that's astonishing.....

[semi_infinite]

Santa Clara County death count is 69. If the Stanford data is accurate, then midpoint mortality rate is 0.1%, not a whole lot high than flu.

[vinmantoo]

Dr. John Brownstein, an epidemiologist at Boston Children's Hospital and an ABC News contributor, cautioned that the results for the California county are not necessarily representative of the U.S. population and noted the use of online ads to find participants could skew the candidate pool. But, he said, the work is "adding to this confirmation of what we've expected, which is a much larger number of cases than we ever anticipated."

"There has been wide recognition that we were undercounting infections because of lack of testing or patients were asymptomatic," Brownstein said.

I am confident there are more people infected than we know about and once that number is nailed down we can begin to assess how many people are truly asymptomatic. However, this study was not random but rather used volunteers. We don't know how many had symptoms in the past or even were experiencing symptoms at the time they were being tested. Maybe that is known and such people excluded from the study but I didn't see that information. We would need a truly random sampling to get more accurate information about how many people had/have coronavirus and what percentage are asymptomatic. Such random testing would need to be carried out in multiple different areas.

We do have a random population already tested so we have a feel for percentage of asymptomatic already. I believe all the sailors on the USS Theodore Roosevelt were tested and some 600 had coronavirus virus. Of these, 60% are currently asymptomatic. The caveat being these are young healthy men and women. A different population such as older people or people with pre-existing health conditions would have a different outcome. I would guess that population would fare worse. Another factor we don't know about is the viral dosage the sailors were exposed to and that could affect outcome. That means we should consider that USS Roosevelt as the best example of random testing so far and it is highly unlikely that the percentage of asymptomatic patients would change by an order of magnitude.