Coronavirus: A Ray Peat Perspective

[LeeLemonoil]

Glucans from mushrooms protect against virus infections


Eating several types of mushrooms every day may protect against potentially deadly flu viruses. This is suggested by an animal study that American researchers at the University of Louisville published in the Annals of Translational Medicine a few years ago. According to the study, glucans not only make the innate immune system more aggressive, but they also speed up the production of antibodies by the adaptive part of the immune system.

 

[Oleg]

I agree @ecstatichamster
I think the virus is a front for other things going on behind the scenes.... I’m just a tin foil hat kinda dude so I’m not not basing this on anything other than my own suspicions of geopolitical motives...

Yes, geopolitical is the key word here!

 

[Literally]

Sometimes being open conspiracy theories shows you are smart.
Being confident in something you have no evidence about shows you are stupid.
Thinking that coronovirus (or any virus) might be a seeecret bioweapon with nefarious purposes behind it shows you don't know much about viruses. These things evolve too fast to control. If we see viruses that are genetically programmed to target particular individuals or races AND have artificial limits in how they can replicate and evolve, then you can start worrying about that.

That's virtually nothing, the regular flu kills more people, traffic accidents kill more people, even storms probably kill more people.

@Atman like just about all of your comments here, this is quite stupid.

When you have a phenomenon that is growing, you don't measure it in absolute numbers at the beginning of the process.

The best data available suggest that the virus kills about 1.5% of infected women and just under 3% of infected men (this discrepancy is probably related to higher smoking rates in Chinese men). Relatively speaking this is way higher than any typical flu, although you can find inaccurate statements to the contrary.

And the R0 is about 3.5x higher than the flu. Meaning the average number of new people infected by each infected person is MUCH higher. This is something to be concerned about. It's also why you measure rates, not absolute numbers, at the beginning of a phenomenon. So, saying this is no more concerning than the flu or similar annual diseases is objectively wrong.

Is it overhyped? Of course. Isn't everything.
Are governments taking advantage? Don't they always.
Is general immunity overlooked by the public? As always, unfortunately. Does that mean if you are generally healthy you have nothing to worry about? No. Healthy people can die. Furthermore, it's seeing generally healthy people die that is driving part of the panic. The same thing happened in the 1918 flu... when people saw regular US soldiers (generally healthy men) were dying, that it *wasn't* just isolated to the elderly and infirm, it caused a lot of concern. It's simply false (not to mention ethically wrong) to tell people they have nothing to worry about if their general health is fine. Whether the virus can affect you could also depend on genetics or other factors (including luck).

One thing we have going for us in the West: it is generally the case that pathogens spread significantly more quickly in collectivized (as opposed to individualistic) cultures.

 

[tankasnowgod]

When you have a phenomenon that is growing, you don't measure it in absolute numbers at the beginning of the process.

The best data available suggest that the virus kills about 1.5% of infected women and just under 3% of infected men (this discrepancy is probably related to higher smoking rates in Chinese men). Relatively speaking this is way higher than any typical flu, although you can find inaccurate statements to the contrary.

And the R0 is about 3.5x higher than the flu. Meaning the average number of new people infected by each infected person is MUCH higher. This is something to be concerned about. It's also why you measure rates, not absolute numbers, at the beginning of a phenomenon. So, saying this is no more concerning than the flu or similar annual diseases is objectively wrong.

Why do you assume this is "the beginning of the process?" Why isn't it the middle, or the end? Just because reports are coming out?

The data you are referring to are "diagnosed cases," not necessarily "infected." The true number of cases will always be higher. That being said, the rates you posted aren't "way higher than the flu." The flu kills about 1% of infected, COVID 19, supposedly about 2%. You can suggest it's double, but you are again comparing an extremely small sample size to a well established one. CC Sabathia's 2005 batting average of .333 and slugging percentage of 1.000 would make him one of the all time great hitters! After all, Barry Bonds lifetime batting average was .298, and his slugging percentage was .607. Obviously, Sabathia was a way better hitter than Bonds!

Too bad Sabathia only had 6 at bats that year. Comparing that to Bonds 9847 career AB is absurd. The rates you are suggesting are even more ridiculous than that example, comparing something that infects 50 Million annually (for decades, if not centuries) to something that has infected about 90,000 people total in history (apparently). That's why batting average and ERA awards in baseball have a minimum number of AB or IP.

So without minimums in place, you are left with artifacts of a very small sample size. Your infection percentages and Ro have no real meaning, in any sort of long term scenario. Objectively, this isn't even as concerning as the flu or even the common cold. It is far, far, far less so.

 

[Literally]

Comparing death rates, rather than absolute numbers, is an obviously smart thing to do for something that is suspected to spread exponentially.

Why do you assume this is "the beginning of the process?" Why isn't it the middle, or the end? Just because reports are coming out?

Well we don't have to, really. We can just do the math for the current strains without using these semantics. I wont use them below. We just need to agree there is an open question about whether COVID-19 is quantifiable worse than a typical year's flu.

I do take seriously widespread reports of a new and growing strain of coronavirus, rather than blindly assuming that it's fake news. Whereas it seems to me the opposite assumption is largely baked into your thinking. I get it... I'm suspicious of mainstream narratives. But believing the opposite of the mainstream narrative all the time is (precisely) as mistaken, logically, as always believing it. In this situation doubters are put at a disadvantage because it's hard to prove something doesn't exist. All I can say at a high level is that if this is overblown to the point of being a false narrative, we'll eventually know. On the other hand, if it turns out to be worse than SARS we'll also know that eventually. I lean towards the latter in this case, based on the best available facts.

I can address the gaping holes in your argument Your reasoning is usually to higher standards, @tankasnowgod... this is just miserable work, I'm (genuinely) sorry to say.

The data you are referring to are "diagnosed cases," not necessarily "infected." The true number of cases will always be higher.

No, you have it wrong. Let's look at Coronavirus Age, Sex, Demographics (COVID-19) - Worldometer

Here you can see in the first table, by sex, that the numbers for "all cases" in the right most column are close to what I gave above. That's the best available estimate of what you call the "infected". If you look the column just to the left, that is diagnosed cases. There the reported figure is a 2.8% death rate for females and 4.7% death rate for males.

When you compare apples to apples, using the best available data, the death rate of COVID-19 is something like 10 times that of a typical flu season. Not coincidentally, the Guardian recently reported just this

If borne out by further testing, this could mean that current estimates of a roughly 1% fatality rate are accurate. This would make Covid-19 about 10 times more deadly than seasonal flu, which is estimated to kill between 290,000 and 650,000 people a year globally.

Yes, it is worse than the flu: busting the coronavirus myths

But they are apparently using less recent data than what I cited above, which would make the resulting number worse.

You can suggest it's double, but you are again comparing an extremely small sample size to a well established one. CC Sabathia's 2005 batting average of .333 and slugging percentage of 1.000 would make him one of the all time great hitters! After all, Barry Bonds lifetime batting average was .298, and his slugging percentage was .607. Obviously, Sabathia was a way better hitter than Bonds!

It's questionable that the flu population is as large as you say, i.e as commonly reported. Remarkably little actual confirmation of diagnosis is actually ever done. Here the criticisms of typical public health propaganda about *the flu* are well merited. But this isn't the important point here.

The important points in addressing your misuse of a general truth of statistics are two.

First, your baseball stats are "after the fact," whereas you want to use justify using a general truism about statistics to beg the question.

Second, you are using a mathematical principle in a rhetorical argument, without doing the actual math. This is a hilarious misuse of statistics.

You can suggest it's double, but you are again comparing an extremely small sample size to a well established one.

Incorrect. The sampling rate in authoritarian China where the virus is occurring is much higher than the sampling rate for annual flu.

Did you mean perhaps that I am comparing a small population to a large population. I think that would be the charitable assumption here... so let's give you the benefit of the doubt on that. Especially since it would equally apply to your baseball game analogy, where sampling is 100% of played games for the two players you mentioned. (Incidentally, your example draws from descriptive statistics, but you are trying to apply it to inferential statistics. This alone shows you have no business purporting to be able to use statistics correctly.)

Also, it's true that comparing a small population to a large one can be dangerous. Does it then follow that because Sabathia played only 15 games one year, that we can dismiss the available statistics? Um, no. It does show that you are either willing to deceive people by pretending that you know statistics well enough to make these sorts of claims, or have managed to deceive yourself.

It's true that the statistics available are not as reliable because of the scope and size of the phenomenon, but just invoking a story about baseball doesn't help quantify that in the slightest way. However, if history is any guide when it comes to China's early reports on outbreaks, the reported statistics are likely to be low, rather than high. Whether or not the government is a bastard, that is just embarrassing dude. Get a grip.

I note that you completely ignore the data I mentioned about he virulence. THE most important thing that can be known about a potential disease outbreak. Is your argument ultimately be that we should ignore virulence data at the beginning of outbreaks, if sample size and/or population is is small? Because this is suuuuper retarded.

I am not claiming to know with certainty whether it will become a a big deal. I am saying there are credible reasons to worry that it will be, and to people reading here: when you encounter arguments to the contrary that happen to be balderdash it should really make you stop and think. Sometimes there are bad outbreaks, ideology notwithstanding. This seems like it might be one of them.

Even if so, we should, of course, keep it in perspective.

 

[Peater Piper]

The flu kills about 1% of infected, COVID 19, supposedly about 2%. You can suggest it's double, but you are again comparing an extremely small sample size to a well established one.

.1%, so 2% would be 20x higher. But I don't think we know the true mortality rate of COVID-19, and I think the unknown is what's driving a lot of the fear. This could be nothing, or it could turn into a pandemic. Time will tell.

The data you are referring to are "diagnosed cases," not necessarily "infected."

Keep in mind that both the WHO and CDC rely on modeling instead of diagnosed cases. As the CDC says, "only counting deaths where influenza was recorded on a death certificate would be a gross underestimation of influenza’s true impact." The flu would actually look less deadly if we only relied on "diagnosed cases."

 

[Literally]

Well spoken @Peater Piper. My understanding is the "right hand column" figures cited above *are* the projected ones, whereas the columns just to the left relies on diagnosed cases. While the projections should not be dismissed because they are "based on small samples" lol, there is more room for nefariousness here. I think there's a good case CDC overstates flue cases.

One quite non-conspiratoiral/hype-based reason that early numbers can trend upwards -- as it appears we may be seeing is this. Most of the early numbers rely on:

dead/(infected + dead)

Unfortunately, this counts infected-but-not-yet-dead people the wrong way. Oops!

The real solution to this is to look at

dead / (recovered + dead)

Doing that with best available numbers puts the death rate around 8%. Yikes. I hope I'm wrong about this and no one loses a loved one over this, but I hope the narcissisic twats above will remember their confidence if we end up hearing about it on this forum. It's good to remember also that many of our loved ones include the old and infirm, and those who may not have been as successful at boosting their overall health, and those who are still struggling. The mortality rates for at risk groups are higher than the reported average rates, just as those in good health will have lower rates.

Seems like we will know quite soon the truth of this.

 

[Vesi]

Well spoken @Peater Piper. My understanding is the "right hand column" figures cited above *are* the projected ones, whereas the columns just to the left relies on diagnosed cases. While the projections should not be dismissed because they are "based on small samples" lol, there is more room for nefariousness here. I think there's a good case CDC overstates flue cases.

One quite non-conspiratoiral/hype-based reason that early numbers can trend upwards -- as it appears we may be seeing is this. Most of the early numbers rely on:

dead/(infected + dead)

Unfortunately, this counts infected-but-not-yet-dead people the wrong way. Oops!

The real solution to this is to look at

dead / (recovered + dead)

Doing that with best available numbers puts the death rate around 8%. Yikes. I hope I'm wrong about this and no one loses a loved one over this, but I hope the narcissisic twats above will remember their confidence if we end up hearing about it on this forum. It's good to remember also that many of our loved ones include the old and infirm, and those who may not have been as successful at boosting their overall health, and those who are still struggling. The mortality rates for at risk groups are higher than the reported average rates, just as those in good health will have lower rates.

Seems like we will know quite soon the truth of this.

Thank you for your posts. It is unbelievable that most posts on this subject are about conspiracies, saying that 'it is just a flu' or denying germ theory. Mind boggles.

 

[LeeLemonoil]

Arguably the foremost German virologist said yesterday that 60-70% of the entire poupulstion of the country will very get infected over the course of the next 24 month.
60% would be ~48 Million people. 2% lethality rate would be nearly 1 million dead.
Not nothing

 

[LeeLemonoil]

And he said that 2 years is a favourable scenario. Might happen faster with more dead due overburdened medical and general care / infrastructure

 

[LeeLemonoil]

Germany will likely impacted heavier due to it suffering a constant stream of illegal migration from Asia and Africa with perceivably lot of undiscovered infected

 

[LeeLemonoil]

One month old and wrong on all accounts.

There was an interesting interview with a prolific German virologist on the major news program.
He said that very likely Corona is not an extraordinarily dangerous virus in terms of lethality. What we see with lethality rate 2-3% is a statistical distortion since in the beginning of epidemics the critical and serious cases stand out while there is no clear picture on the real amount of infected.
Experts are now fairly certain that because younger and healthy people that were infected survive often without serious symptoms the virus can’t really posses a lethality if 2-3% and the numbers of infected but unregistered people is way higher than those registered - meaning that lethality of the virus is much lower then 2-3%

Efforts of the Chinese to treat and contain are universally praised.

 

[Vesi]

Current notes on covid19:

R0: 3.51 - 4.05 ( Epidemiological and clinical features of the 2019 novel coronavirus outbreak in China )
4.70 - 6.60 ( https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.02.07.20021154v1.full.pdf )
6.11 - 8.18 ( Early epidemiological assessment of the transmission potential and virulence of 2019 Novel Coronavirus in Wuhan City: China, 2019-2020 )
Seasonal flu has an R0 of 1.3

Case fatality rate 2-3%
( Three Emerging Coronaviruses in Two Decades: The Story of SARS, MERS, and Now COVID-19 )
20-30 times higher than the CFR of the season flu, which is around .1%

Incubation period median 3 days. (Range 0 to 24.0 days.)
( Clinical characteristics of 2019 novel coronavirus infection in China )

Can be transmitted without the infected showing any symptoms.
( Presumed Asymptomatic Carrier Transmission of COVID-19 )

Roughly 20% of infections result in serious symptoms that require medical intervention.
( Coronavirus: 81% of cases are mild, study says )
More than 10 times the hospitalization rate of the seasonal flu.

Symptoms from SARS-CoV-2 can persist over a month.
( https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanres/article/PIIS2213-2600(20)30079-5/fulltext )
Symptoms for seasonal flu typically tend to clear after 5 days.

? Tests return false negatives 50-70%.
( Coronavirus: US firm develops new test that can confirm cases in 30 m… )

? Possible testicular damage.
( ACE2 Expression in Kidney and Testis May Cause Kidney and Testis Damage After 2019-nCoV Infection )

? Possible aerosol transmission.

? Possible antibody-dependent enhancement
( https://jvi.asm.org/content/94/5/e02015-19 )
( https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3335060/ )

No herd immunity -> can theoretically infect the entire population.
(Korean psychiatric department where the virus infected 99/102 people.)

Compared to the seasonal flu, SARS-CoV-2
(1) spreads faster
(2) kills far more
(3) is harder to control
(4) requires use of far more medical resources
(5) for far longer a period of time
(6) has no effective treatment
(7) can infect entire populations

These factors combined mean that SARS-CoV-2, is far more likely to overwhelm a country's medical infrastructure. Additionally, when medical infrastructure is overwhelmed, the CFR will skyrocket because we know that 20% of cases require medical intervention.

 

[ecstatichamster]

It is just a flu.

People in poor health and old are the primary people who die from it.

Death rate is probably 1.5% or 2% as opposed to 1% from flu. Largely preventable.

I doubt 20% of people getting it require medical attention. Perhaps malnourished people living a burden of third world air pollution do, but I doubt people in first world countries will face anything like that.

 

[ecstatichamster]

the rates you posted aren't "way higher than the flu." The flu kills about 1% of infected, COVID 19, supposedly about 2%.

This is what Dr. Peat said in his interview with Patrick Timpone a week ago, which I posted.

This is really a huge hype train by economic forces who benefit for various reasons from world wide medical panics.

It is a flu that kills people who are weak and old.

Healthy people have very little to worry about.

I predict by the end of March this will be out of the news cycle. This is the moment of high panic. In any event, when the weather changes in the Northern hemisphere it is gone. It may come back a few more Winters, but that’s the nature of flu.

 

[Literally]

Death rate is probably 1.5% or 2% as opposed to 1% from flu.

You seem to have no argument whatsoever associated with these pronouncements.
Based on what? Your ideology? Your fantasies?

Why do you feel the flu death rate is so much higher than it is reported in official statistics?

Why do you feel the COVID-19 death rate is so much lower than it is reported in official statistics?

It would be one thing to say the existing statistics are BS... but in this case how would you alone know the real ones?

Why would Chinese authorities dramatically overstate the death rates, when in every historical case we know about they have initially tried to do the opposite?

 

[Vesi]

It is just a flu.

People in poor health and old are the primary people who die from it.

Death rate is probably 1.5% or 2% as opposed to 1% from flu. Largely preventable.

I doubt 20% of people getting it require medical attention. Perhaps malnourished people living a burden of third world air pollution do, but I doubt people in first world countries will face anything like that.

Influenza case fatality rate is ~0.1%.
Covid-19 case fatality rate is 2-3%

List of human disease case fatality rates - Wikipedia

 

[tankasnowgod]

Why would Chinese authorities dramatically overstate the death rates, when in every historical case we know about they have initially tried to do the opposite?

That's an easy one.... to exert control over people. The Communist Chinese Government has imposed movement restrictions on at least 50 Million people, and I've seen many supposedly "freedom" loving right leaning pundits congratulate that same government for acting rationally.

To be fair, I don't know if they are overstating the death rates, but I can imagine plenty of reasons why they might want to do so.

 

[tankasnowgod]

Influenza case fatality rate is ~0.1%.
Covid-19 case fatality rate is 2-3%

List of human disease case fatality rates - Wikipedia

Ahh, Wikipedia. It's never wrong, you know!

 

[Literally]

Ahh, Wikipedia. It's never wrong, you know!

It tends to be better than just making stuff up, though. Many other sources were cited. If your argument is that we don't have good data, why would your so-called "data" be any better?

That's an easy one.... to exert control over people. The Communist Chinese Government has imposed movement restrictions on at least 50 Million people, and I've seen many supposedly "freedom" loving right leaning pundits congratulate that same government for acting rationally.

Really?? We've take the time to dismantle every substantive point of your previous post, and *this* is what you choose to respond to?

Well, okay then. I don't think it's necessary for the government to put up particular numbers to an innumerate populace in order to do that.