Median lag from infection until death is somewhere between 10-18 days, but not everyone is diagnosed on day 1 of infection. Many people are diagnosed when they get seriously ill and present to hospital, and die shortly after
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Replying to @GidMK @devisridhar
Thanks Gideon. That's why I've tried to skip "confirmed/diagnosed cases" and instead focus on the relationship between actual infections - detected or not, and deaths. Actual infections critical for public comms re: lockdown complacency. "Confirmed cases" are iceberg tip?
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Replying to @JamieWoodhouse @devisridhar
Yes and no. Much better to stick to confirmed cases as this is the data you have. Extrapolating to 'actual' infections is extremely challenging and really relies on your assumptions more than it does the data
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If you are going to extrapolate, best evidence after the fact from Wuhan seems to indicate that 'confirmed' cases are somewhere between 20-50% of all cases, so a sense-check would be if you are extrapolating beyond a multiplier of 5x it's unlikely to be true
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Replying to @GidMK @devisridhar
OK - but if we assume confirmed cases (9.5k) are 20% of the total infected number, then we have ~47k total infections now per your article. If you use 14 days infected to death, that implies 14 days ago we had ~1300 total infections (4 doublings). So CV kills 1 in 3 infected!?!
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Replying to @JamieWoodhouse @devisridhar
Nope. You can't just extrapolate back like that. 14 days ago the UK had ~800 confirmed cases. Moreoever, see my first point in terms of using current death numbers and a median death time to extrapolate anything - you can't really
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Replying to @GidMK @devisridhar
We had 456 on 11/3. And your 456 x 5 implies 2280 real infections then. Yet we've seen 463 deaths 14 days later. Implying CV kills 20% or 1 in 5 of everyone infected? I just don't understand how we can get this many deaths without many more real infections 2 weeks back.
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Replying to @JamieWoodhouse @devisridhar
Because you can't just extrapolate from the median length of time. It's an average. That's why we use a case-fatality ratio, because this kind of extrapolation can be extremely misleading
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It also depends on your demographics. COVID-19 does indeed kill ~30% of those aged 80+. If you have a disproportionate number of elderly people infected (as in Italy), you see much higher death rates
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Replying to @GidMK @devisridhar
Of course. So are you suggesting that every one of the ~2,280 people infected (not just tested positive) in the UK two weeks ago were in the most vulnerable demographic - so ~30% IFR? That would explain the 463 deaths to date.
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This is getting incredibly tedious. No, I'm not saying that, but I will say that it might be worth wondering why no pandemic experts are making this kind of back-of-the-envelop calculation to guess at the true number of cases
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Replying to @GidMK @devisridhar
Sorry. I get the "we just don't know" approach, but it's concerning that you think 50k are infected in UK, other experts (govt.) imply 500k and others suggest 35 million. Wouldn't conducting a random representative test sample of gen pop answer the question?
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I'll leave you alone, but to close, using your ~50k current infected estimate, interested in your view of: - Total infected estimate 14 days ago - Infection doubling rate since then - IFR% that implies given actual deaths to date. Just trying to understand (as are the public)
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