[conspire] Columbia University Hospital data

[Rick Moen]

https://www.livescience.com/coronavirus-in-pregnant-woman-high-nyc.html
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2009316

Technically, this was (as Deirdre suggested to me last night) _two_ 
hospitals, Columbia University Medical Center and New York-Presbyterian
Allen Hospital, operated under common management.

----- Forwarded message from Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com> -----

Date: Thu, 16 Apr 2020 14:36:19 -0700
From: Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com>
To: skeptic at linuxmafia.com
Subject: Re: [skeptic] The Stupid Plague
Organization: If you lived here, you'd be $HOME already.

Quoting Eva Durant (durant.eva at gmail.com):

> Well, UK govt. also sat on their arses all February without any
> preparation, now have no idea how many people actually dying, health and
> care workers are not tested, there is no adequate protective and other
> needed stuff still, Boris was stupid enough to catch the virus, yet -
> The tory and PM popularity is growing. Figure.

In even the best case, the ability to extrapolate from official COVID-19
case (and even official COVID-19 death!) figures to real ones is deeply
problematic in the absence of adequate testing.  Add to that the
incentive many national, regional, and local governments have to _lie_ 
and minimise even the poor and inadequate data available, and you have a
situation where you really cannot trust the numbers.

Last month, Columbia University Hospital initiated a policy that all
pregnant women admitted to give birth were given PCR-based blood testing
for SARS-CoV-2 current infection -- _all_ of those women, full stop.  It
turned out that 13% of these patients had active COVID-19 infections,
asymptomatically presenting.

That's a very interesting and suggestive data point, because the only
built-in bias to the data is selecting for relative youth and for
(obviously) being female.  To the extent you can judge that as a
representive sample of NYC general -- and I'm thinking "yes, you can"
-- this suggests that one in eight New Yorkers is walking around
shedding virus without symptoms.  Actually, probably significantly more,
given that a month has now passed since that study began, and everyone 
concurs that NYC has gone from very badly off to very, very badly off.


_______________________________________________
skeptic mailing list
skeptic at linuxmafia.com
http://linuxmafia.com/mailman/listinfo/skeptic
To reach the listadmin, mail rick at linuxmafia.com 

----- End forwarded message -----