(04-17-2020, 09:46 AM)burger Wrote: I'd bet a large sum of money that they got an unrepresentative sample. It just makes sense that people who would go out of their way to get blood drawn are curious about their exposure. So their sample probably had a disproportionate number of people who either had symptoms or were exposed to the virus through family, coworkers, etc. With only 50 positives, it wouldn't take many such people to produce a highly biased estimate.
Reports from Wuhan today are saying that 2.5% of hospital employees there were seropositive. I have trouble imagining that there's a higher prevalence in an entire US county that has far fewer deaths per capita.
I hope this paper doesn't get published without of immense proportions alterations.
Indeed, from what I can tell, it didn't even exclude people who tested positive for COVID-19.
But publication won't matter, what matters is how it gets reported. I bet dollars to donuts one of the Fox News anchors features this story before evening is up.
Ok, now I'm pretty infuriated by how obviously irresponsible their estimates are. They estimate based on their data that IFR is between .12% and .2% If so, NYC has 8.4m people, so at 100% prevalence, that'd be 10,000 deaths at IFR of .12% and 16,700 deaths at IFT of .2%. NYC has already reported well over 11,000 deaths. So unless we think NYC is totally, utterly unrepresentative, it's already blown past the low end of their estimated IFR and will likely exceed the high end within a week.