[conspire] New paper on spread in a "tightly knit" Brooklyn community

[Deirdre Saoirse Moen]

While I appreciate that they deliberately veiled the community in the paper to prevent religious and ethnic issues further down the line, just for this list, it’s pretty clear this is the Hasidic community in Brooklyn, which has large families in small houses in tight quarters. This is a study that happened about a month after Purim, which is a rather joyous Jewish holiday.

It also covers widespread serology testing of the same community, which is really interesting, and specifically testing long-term immunity that’s developed.

With that in mind, essentially, here’s the problem: when we talk about “herd immunity” in the big wide world, there are inherent concepts of density in mind. Like: herd immunity equations fundamentally do not work for prison populations, which is why COVID-19 was found in 192 of 195 (off the top of my head) in a women’s prison in, uh, Louisiana? Some Gulf of Mexico state I’ve visited. :P

Yay, numbers brain. https://www.marketwatch.com/story/louisana-prison-unit-has-192-of-195-inmates-test-positive-for-covid-19-2020-05-05

Anyhow, back to the story about Brooklyn. So, the problem with “tightly knit” communities is that there really IS no upper bound, unfortunately. Thus, it was of immense interest to see how far it had indeed actually spread, especially in a community known to be particularly hard hit.

So here’s the paper.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.23.20111427v1.full.pdf

What’s interesting is that the only age group that *didn’t* have antibodies were people over age 100. So even small kids had antibodies, showing that there were children whose innate immune systems didn’t fend it off (and they therefore developed long-term immunity).

Overall: 47% positive, 53% positive in men, 41% in women. (Overall, in typical populations, women are more likely to catch COVID-19, but men are more likely to die from it, so this is anomalous.)

The highest % by age group? 58% in 11-15 and 61% in 16-20.

Note that these are people who had *serum* level responses, meaning they had a full reaction to it, whether they knew it or not.

36% were asymptomatic and had no known exposure
35% were asymptomatic with known exposure

Just sayin.

Deirdre