Comments

I’ve read a lot of articles much like this one — 45 Comments

1. 5% of tested are found positive in Utah so I think it must be fairly easy to get tested. I’ve heard of people with no symptoms testing positive and getting sent home to self quarantine. Could be those folks had reason to think they had been exposed even though not showing symptoms and that was enough to get them the test.

   I do know someone in California who couldn’t get tested, but that’s California for you.

2. My daughter in northern Virginia was home for a week and a half with a fever and cough. It never got bad enough for medical intervention, and she didn’t even try to get a test. Urgent Care places were testing high fevers and serious symptoms. So we don’t know if she had a mild case of COVID-19 or if she had the flu. She went back to work after being fever-free for three days.

3. From what I’ve read regular folks (as opposed to Tom Hanks, Boris Johnson, et al.) find themselves in a labyrinth if they have Covid-like symptoms.

   These people want to do the right thing and they want to know their status, but good effing luck. It’s one blind alley or bureaucratic run-around after another.

   At a less important level I find myself confused (and sometimes yelled at) when I walk into some essential service (grocery store, restaurant, apartment complex office) and don’t know the proper procedure because they changed it from a few days before and I can’t read their minds about the memo they got last night from headquarters.

   Instead I get to read yards of cloying blather about how we’re all in it together and they just want me to be safe.

   Blech.

4. Reminiscent of Peggy Noonan’s TWO columns about her difficulties getting tested, talking her way into a test that she did not meet the criteria for (but lied about travel to China in order to qualify), and then apparently tested negative. She doesn’t actually say that — but the implication is strong that she was not positive.

   This is one of the problems health care professionals are faced with: they set up criteria and protocols and people take them as challenges to be overcome. I understand people wanting to know if they are NOT infected, but at some point you have to trust health care professionals who say you do NOT qualify for a test. Otherwise, it’s just chaos out there.

5. Those self diagnosing without symptoms need to stop bunching up their panties and learn to knit. Chris Cuomo claims he has a very high fever, chills that make him shake so hard he chipped a tooth, and he has never felt so awful in his life. But he has the energy to host his TV show from home day after day. That doesn’t pass my sniff test. It seems to me that for some people claiming COVID19 victim status it is all about orangemanbad.

6. I don’t get it.
   Our “universal precautions” assume that you, me, and everyone else carries the Chinese Flu. If I come down w/ “flu-like symptoms”, neither I nor anyone else would be made better off by knowing that I tested positive, though it might be useful info for epidemiologists.

7. Is this going to be like these events like Woodstock where in the future millions will say they had it with no proof whatsoever?

   On another note, how long until someone is greatly injured or killed by the mob for going for a walk or standing six inches past some line on the floor? Already seen videos of people yelling at others about being outside.

   When you create an authoritarian state there are always those that get off on the thrill of enforcing the governments edicts.

   And how about google tracking people? That’s not scary at all. But, hey, bend the curve and all that, right?

8. Estoy Listo:

   You write: “Our ‘universal precautions’ assume that you, me, and everyone else carries the Chinese Flu.”

   No, it assumes that anyone might be a carrier, not that everyone is.

   You also write: “If I come down w/ ‘flu-like symptoms’, neither I nor anyone else would be made better off by knowing that I tested positive, though it might be useful info for epidemiologists.”

   Not only would it be useful for epidemiologists, but it would be useful for you and those around you. You would know how stringent the isolation might be that you would need to implement. Stay away from people for 14 days, or less? You would also know if you could consider yourself (probably) immune in the future. You also would know if you could potentially become a plasma donor to help other victims. You also might ease some of the anxiety and stress you might feel at thinking you have it.

   Lots of benefits to testing and knowing.

9. huxley,

   My mother, who is in her early 80s, has had something for the past 3 weeks, or so. She is a very tough woman and a non complainer. Some days she is convinced she is on the upswing, then she gets overly tired. I know my father is staying on top of things, and so far he has been symptom free and keeping an eye on her condition. Me and other family members (my folks live in a remote area, hours from immediate family, and no one wants to risk infecting them with a visit) call her daily to check on how she is doing. We finally convinced her to go to an urgent care. They tested her for influenza A and sent her home to await test results. The results were negative, but they told her that with her current symptoms a hospital would not take her. Which is good news that they are not severe enough. She does not have a bad cough, but she has a cough and some other symptoms, but it’s not a close match to COVID symptoms.

   All a long winded way of saying they don’t seem to be administering tests willy nilly where my folks live.

10. Griffin,

    100%! I have had many people tell me they are convinced they had it earlier in the flu season. And who knows, maybe some have. But I’m almost certain some are using it as a sort-of, stolen valor circumstance. We may all be getting the anti-body test one day, and then we’ll have verification.

11. Rufus T. Firefly: Your mother/father story reminds me of my favorite Ebola account.

    A young Liberian nursing student, Fatu Kekula, took her father to the hospital on account of a spike in blood pressure. He was given a bed. Unfortunately, the bed was infected with Ebola. So the father went home, developed Ebola and infected Fatu’s mother, sister and cousin.

    By this time the hospitals were full-up with Ebola patients, so Fatu had to take care of her famiy as best she could at home. She consulted her teachers, acquired medicines and IV lines, and invented her own personal protective equipment (PPE):
    ____________________________________________________

    Every day, several times a day for about two weeks, Fatu put trash bags over her socks and tied them in a knot over her calves. Then she put on a pair of rubber boots and then another set of trash bags over the boots.

    She wrapped her hair in a pair of stockings and over that a trash bag. Next she donned a raincoat and four pairs of gloves on each hand, followed by a mask.

    It was an arduous and time-consuming process, but Fatu was religious about it, never cutting corners.

    https://www.cnn.com/2014/09/25/health/ebola-fatu-family
    ______________________________________________________

    Fatu saved her mother, father and sister, though not her cousin, without becoming infected herself. A true hero. Her “trashbag” PPE was taught to other Liberians.

    A big part of why that Ebola epidemic was tamed was because African communities got smarter and took action.

12. I’m going to encourage my daughter, when the blood test is available, to see if she had it. She’s got O-negative blood and could help people with plasma.

13. huxley:

    A family in our church has a son who is and was a Doctor (Christian missionary) serving at a hospital in Liberia during that episode.

14. huxley,

    I remember reading that story. Its terrific. I love humanity and I love how it adapts.

15. Just checked up on Fatu. Her nursing school was closed due to Ebola, but a crowdfunding effort and her heroism got her into Emory in Atlanta to finish her studies:

    https://www.rejectedprincesses.com/blog/modern-worthies/fatu-kekula

    What a great smile!

16. Somewhat related to this Neo:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRDsYG57qII

    That video was put up in the comments at Instapundit. Its about 12 minutes and is a compilation of various video taken by regular people visiting hospitals that have reported large numbers and overwhelming situations. Then comparing them to news media reporting. They do mention the CBS Italy/NYC video as well.

17. huxley,

    That’s wonderful! I wish I had known about the crowdfunding. I would have contributed. Good for her and God bless her.

18. In my narrative, universal precautions means that I act as though both you and I have the virus. I can see that value of knowing that I’ve had it; that would free me up to return to the community. Still, testing to confirm the symptoms doesn’t seem beneficail. Testing post recovery does.

19. Holy Cow!
    What value is there in using limited testing resources to “find out whether you’ve had it”?
    You have either had it or have not.
    If you have had it (and many, many asymptomatic people have), they are still banned from unessential travel and work in most parts of the USA.

    So shut up and wash your hands.

    Even if you’ve had the China virus, you can still pick it up on your hands and spread it on to others.

    The ignorance, narrow-mindedness and selfishness of many of my fellow Americans never fails to amaze me.

20. That’s wonderful! I wish I had known about the crowdfunding. I would have contributed. Good for her and God bless her.

    Fractal Rabbit: Me too!

    Not #MeToo…

21. If this kind of first person bleating with political snark thrown gets you down, best stay away from Medium.com 😀

22. Rufus T. Firefly:

    Apparently there is a flu going around that has very similar symptoms. So it’s understandable that people would sincerely think they had it when they didn’t.

    I hope we all get the antibody test some day, but I very much doubt it. Maybe in Iceland they’ll do it; our population is just too huge. What they might do is test it on a random sample of the population here and then draw conclusions from that.

    It may end up being a bit like all the people who think they have some Native American heritage and when they get DNA tests they find it’s zero for them.

    Or it may be that tons of people will have had COVID who didn’t even suspect they had it.

23. I *may* have had the swine flu in 2009. It was pretty much the worst flu I’ve had since I was a kid and I was quite sick for a couple days, meaning I spent most of my time home from work sleeping and feeling miserable and not watching TV or playing video games. Occupational health at work was well aware of swine flu and their instructions were simply to self-monitor my temperature after I started feeling better. If I was afebrile for 3 days (temperature below 100), I could get checked out by occ health and they would clear me to return to work. Even though they suspected swine flu (and this was in the fall of 2009, when it was well known), they never told me to self-quarantine (though I did on my own), I was never told to wear a mask, and I was never asked to be tested for the virus.

    I could have gone out in public, taken public transport, and infected dozens of other people after I called in sick, and nobody would have been the wiser or even suspicious, that is how little the swine flu was played up in the press. Even though my occupational health department was on top of things regarding the existence of the contagion, they were only concerned about me not showing back up to my work while sick, but had no concern about the community at large.

24. A few days ago Sarah Hoyt, the sci-fi writer and blogger who also does the Instapundit night shift, thought she might have come down with Covid:
    __________________________________________

    …I woke up sans sense of smell or taste (when you have a 21 year old incontinent cat, you can tell when you lost your smell, and Russian Caravan, the tea you drink with a fork, tastes of nothing. Even with sweetener and lemon it tastes only like vaguely sweet water.

    This is universally reported as the first symptom of Wu-flu. (I have a runny nose and a sore throat.) No, I don’t expect to die — not out of the question, with asthma, compromised lung function, etc — but I’m pissed at the prospect that I’m coming down with it, because I already lost two months this year to “mysterious, flu like illness.”

    –https://accordingtohoyt.com/2020/04/01/destroyed-lives/
    __________________________________________

    However, the next day she discounted the possibility:
    __________________________________________

    So, to begin with, I am not dead. And I probably do not have the dread Winnie the Flu. Why not? Well, I do not have a fever and some sense of smell has returned. No, not all of it, but I can now smell the catbox when Euclid forgets to/refuses to cover (it’s hard to know with old codgers. It COULD be his protest against getting old, who knows?) Taste is probably back at 1/2 percent. I can tell I’m drinking tea, not just sweet water. From what I understand, the taste would not come back this quickly if it were Winnie.

    I have since found that a lot of Corona Viruses — one of the normal causes of the common cold — and Rhino Viruses cause this symptom.
    __________________________________________

    My younger sister is in quarantine now because one of her friends lost her sense of smell and taste but otherwise seems all right.

    Hoyt has a fun blog worth your attention, for those who don’t read her yet.

25. Neo:

    It may end up being a bit like all the people who think they have some Native American heritage and when they get DNA tests they find it’s zero for them.

    Hmm, well, don’t forget the way DNA works, and the way those tests often don’t.

    My mother’s grandmother was Cherokee. Yes, it’s a for-sure thing: We have the (early) photos of “Big Mama” (as she was known), in then in her late 60’s, her long straight black hair finally turning gray. Her face is so Native-American-esque as to be cliché; if she isn’t Cherokee she’s either some other kind of Native-American or something Polynesian.

    But one DNA test for my mother show less than 1% Native American; another, less than 5%. Why? Dunno. Why don’t they even show the same percentage, given that they’re analyses of the same person? Dunno.

    At any rate, my family also passed around a virus that either was SARS-CoV-2 (and a mild case), or else was some other unusually-bad virus that came with 102-degree fever and dry cough.

    Interesting question: If, in fact, there are two viruses going around, are they different strains of SARS-CoV-2 (via mutation)? Or is one of them unrelated entirely? It’d be nice to know, and to know which one my family had. Four of the five of us had the fever; all of us took weeks to recover, thinking we’d kicked it and then suddenly getting overtired and sleeping all day. All had the dry cough; after a month mine hasn’t gone away because allergy season started and it turned wet. (Sorry if TMI.)

    Supposing for the sake of argument that there are two viruses, and one of them is unrelated to SARS-CoV-2: Doesn’t a dual, independent, simultaneous emergence seem peculiar? I mean, if it’s an entirely unrelated virus, with the same symptoms, emerging within weeks of the emergence of SARS-CoV-2?

    Is somebody gaslighting us here, or what?

26. huxley on April 3, 2020 at 7:11 pm said:
    Just checked up on Fatu. Her nursing school was closed due to Ebola, but a crowdfunding effort and her heroism got her into Emory in Atlanta to finish her studies:

    https://www.rejectedprincesses.com/blog/modern-worthies/fatu-kekula

    What a great smile!
    * * *
    How come people like this never get a Nobel Prize?
    (I know, I know)

27. R. C.:

    I can try answering your questions, but you may not be too keen on my answers.

    If your great-grandmother was in fact significantly native American, your mother would have more native American DNA than that. The DNA tests vary slightly from company to company, but some of the variation was more pronounced years ago when the pool of people they had tested was smaller. Nowadays it’s quite accurate, although not perfect. But your mother should have inherited about 1/4 of her grandmother’s DNA. If your mother tested close to 5% native American, that means her grandmother might easily have 20% native American ancestry, which is a fair amount, or she might have had a little more or less. But if your mother tested at around 1%, then her grandmother was more like 4% (approximately, not exactly). And it doesn’t matter what your great-grandmother looked like; that isn’t much of a guide. My husband had great aunts who looked very Asian and were absolutely not, for example.

    As far as the illness your family may have had goes, chances are it was good old-fashioned influenza. Flu can kill but it infects tons of people and kills a very small percentage of them. So far, flu has infected WAY more people this year compared to COVID. Take a look at the CDC page for this year’s flu. It says 39,000,000 – 55,000,000 cases, 18,000,000 – 26,000,000 doctor visits, 400,000 – 730,000 hospitalizations, and 24,000 – 63,000 deaths. Below, it says this:

    Because influenza surveillance does not capture all cases of flu that occur in the U.S., CDC provides these estimated ranges to better reflect the larger burden of influenza. These estimates are calculated based on CDC’s weekly influenza surveillance data and are preliminary.

    Influenza testing across the United States may be higher than normal at this time of year because of the COVID-19 pandemic. These estimates may partly reflect increases in testing in recent weeks and may be adjusted downward once the season is complete and final data for the 2019/20 season are available.

    They don’t usually do so many flu tests, but a lot of people who got flu after the COVID pandemic came to this country are being tested and are discovering they really have flu. But if they had their illness prior to February they probably have no idea what it was.

28. “Or it may be that tons of people will have had COVID who didn’t even suspect they had it.”

    That has been my fervent hope for weeks. This seems contagious enough that it will inevitably cycle through the entire population. I get “flattening the curve,” but the faster it gets through all of us, the sooner we can go completely back to normal life.

    If it has not already worked its way through some (many?) of us, there will almost certainly be a rebound when current shelter in place orders are lifted, and waves 2 (3?, 4?) could be just as bad, or worse, resulting in another shut down.

29. huxley,

    Thanks for sharing the tale of Fatu! What an amazing woman. I’m sure she is excelling at Emory.

    My mother shared a funny story. Her and my father needed a few additional supplies. They went out in the car together. He suited up in heavy clothes, a jacket, gloves and winter scarf (it’s still cold where they are, so he didn’t look too odd). Mom stayed in the car while dad did the shopping. When they got home they removed the items from the bags in the garage, then brought them into their kitchen. Mom donned a raincoat and rubber globs and sterilized everything in assembly line fashion. I got such a kick out of picturing mom in her kitchen in a raincoat scrubbing canned goods! Very resourceful. I told them I am very proud.

30. Kate – While O blood is the universal donor for whole red blood, O plasma can only be given to O blood type persons. Blood plasma compatibility is the inverse of red blood cell compatibility. So AB is the universal plasma donor.

31. I know if I had scary symptoms I’d badly want a test, if only to hope that I’d be in the 90% group and could quit worrying so much while I waited a week to stop feeling miserable. But the value of the test is to guide public policy about curtailing spread. It has next to nothing to do with whether I need medical attention, or what kind. For that, the important indicator is shortness of breath, and ideally a pulse ox.

    In the meantime, I already know how to act to minimize contagion, especially in the presence of fever or any other symptoms that should heighten my already-high vigilance. Ditto for the latest fuzzy information about how many in my immediate area are now being counted as confirmed cases.

    As usual, scared people obsess about nearly everything but the crucial issues.

32. The justification for the new recommendation for citizens to voluntarily wear face masks is apparently that evidence is accumulating that the Coronavirus is not just transmissible if someone close to you sneezes or coughs, but is also transmissible if that infected person near to you merely breathes i.e. this virus is transmissible as hell.

    You hear mention about how our experts are gathering statistics from many of the countries with Coronavirus infections, and using them to produce models as a guide to policy making, and among the countries often mentioned is China.

    Well, there was an article yesterday in the Washington Post, of all places, that says that people who are trying to look at all sorts of clues, trying to estimate what the actual death toll has been in Wuhan–vs. the suspiciously low numbers that the Chinese government is reporting–are looking at clues like reports of the number of funeral urns being sent to Wuhan, anecdotal information about how overstretched the 84 crematoriums in that area are, reports of lines and many hour’s long waits at funeral homes to pick up urns of ashes (some accounts I’ve seen elsewhere say people are also searching satellite photos of the area, looking for evidence that large new areas have been dug up for graves), and the estimates they are coming up with are ten times higher than the official death toll of around 3,300, and are in the 40,000 and up range.

    So, this raises the question of, how much US. government experts should rely on death toll numbers (and other “information” about their efforts against, and experiences with the Coronavirus) coming out of China?

    P.S. If these estimates are anywhere near the true death toll for Wuhan alone, what might the true death toll be for all of China?

    As with the true death toll of Tienanmen Square, this is a figure that we will probably never learn—totalitarian China, steadily approaching total surveillance and control, and with their monopoly on force and coercion, is pretty proficient at blocking the surfacing of critical information that their leaders don’t want to see the light of day.

33. A story: Yascha Mounk @Yascha_Mounk, twitter: “Some hopeful news:

    In Northern Italy, 60 volunteers who thought they’d never suffered COVID-19 gave blood. 40 of them tested positive for antibodies to the virus.

    We URGENTLY need randomized testing to see how representative this finding is.”

    https://mobile.twitter.com/Yascha_Mounk/status/1246240181440540672

    Well. Ok then.

    On another topic, somewhat lighter, toward the end of yesterday’s presser the Pres. commenting on the death projection models asserting 100,000 — 240,000 total deaths said while gesturing figuratively with his hands: “I wanna come way under the model. The professionals did the models, I was never involved in a model . . . but . . at least, this kind of a model . . .”

    And he continued in a serious tone about wanting to prevent widespread death.

    Still, it’s amusing to wonder which kind of model he was involved in that flashed through his mind?

34. As I understand it, the kind of detective work I discussed above at 12:40 is exactly the kind of work—gathering all sorts of information from various sources, then piecing together these puzzle pieces to form a more or less coherent picture–is exactly what an Intelligence Analyst does.

    P.S. Here’s an interesting idea with some potential–according to the researcher in the Scientific American article liked below, you can detect the genetic signature of a virus, like Coronavirus, in the sewer “effluent” from a particular area and, thus, can get a measure of how far the virus has penetrated, how wide-spread it is in an area, and far sooner than with other current methods.

    See https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-sewage-could-reveal-true-scale-of-coronavirus-outbreak/

35. Interesting article suggests that people self-report the loss of their sense of smell as a rough proxy for Covid infection:
    __________________________________________

    Lose your sense of smell and you know to isolate yourself, even if you feel great.

    It offers two other things as well: a way to glimpse the virus as it moves through various populations, and a tool for managing the risk.

    https://finance.yahoo.com/news/coronavirus-fix-passes-smell-test-090050931.html
    __________________________________________

    The article’s author is Michael Lewis, who went from a degree in art history to an MA in economics then got caught up in the 80s go-go years as a bond salesman for Salomon Brothers. From that experience he wrote “Liar’s P o k e r” (great!) and on to “Moneyball,” “The Blind Side,” and “The Big Short” plus the article which got me interested in the 2008 Iceland banking collapse:
    __________________________________________

    “You have to understand,” he told me, “Iceland is no longer a country. It is a hedge fund.” 

    “Wall Street on the Tundra”
    https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2009/04/iceland200904
    __________________________________________

    Which is to say, Michael Lewis is a go-to guy for me.

36. huxley:

    Loss of smell or taste is actually a common symptom with many upper respiratory infections, flus, etc.. As soon as I heard that COVID could cause it I wondered why that was considered such a distinguishing symptom.

    For example:

    Below are the main causes of anosmia [loss of smell]:
    Irritation to the mucus membranes lining the nose

    This can result from:

    sinus infections
    common colds
    smoking
    the flu, or influenza
    allergies (allergic rhinitis)
    chronic congestion not related to allergies (nonallergic rhinitis)

    A cold is the most common cause of partial and temporary loss of smell. In these cases, the anosmia will go away on its own.

37. neo: Yes, I am aware of that. Note that I said “rough proxy.”

    Note that earlier in the thread I quoted Sarah Hoyt’s account of how when she lost her sense of smell and felt crummy, she suspected she had Covid, then the next day she concluded she had some other crud.

    Lewis’s point is that right now there is so much Covid about that the symptom can work, not perfectly, as a proxy for Covid which can be useful, given that we lack tests which are cheap, easy and available enough to check for Covid in the general population.
    ___________________________________________________

    The inability to smell was the first symptom many patients noticed; in some cases, it was the only symptom the patients noticed. “In the past it was once in a blue moon that we saw patients who had lost their sense of smell,” Kumar told me. “Now we are seeing it 10 times as often. It’s one of the things that happens with this virus.” The British doctors compared notes with doctors from other countries and gathered what data they could. They concluded that roughly 80% of the people who lost their sense of smell would test positive for the coronavirus, and that somewhere between 30% and 60% of those who had tested positive for the virus had also lost their sense of smell.

    –Michael Lewis
    https://finance.yahoo.com/news/coronavirus-fix-passes-smell-test-090050931.html

38. huxley:

    But that’s the problem. It’s so rough a proxy as to be nearly meaningless, IMHO. Many more people get the flu – even this year, at least so far – than get COVID. If a person has that symptom, it seems to me to be far more likely they have the flu because it’s so much more widespread and often causes the same symptom.

39. In this case I think Lewis is a bit full of himself. Lots of people have talked about this and thought along the same lines. One doesn’t need to have a “background in risk management” to figure this out. Of course it also helps to know something about other illnesses that also can cause anosmia before drawing grand conclusions. You’d think someone with a background in risk management would have thought of that.

40. But that’s the problem. It’s so rough a proxy as to be nearly meaningless, IMHO.

    neo: Michael Lewis has a different humble opinion and backs it up with statistics from doctors.

    I’ll go with Lewis.

41. huxley:

    But for decades I’ve seen loss of smell and/or taste with colds and flu described medically as very common and not rare at all. If doctors are saying in their experience it’s rare, my guess is that prior to COVID most people who had it didn’t report it to their doctors because they figured it was benign and temporary. If it was so rare, why have I always read it’s common, and heard about it from people as well?

    I’m not doubting it’s also a common symptom of COVID. But unless they’re doing an experiment and find that it’s far more common with COVID than with colds or flu, I find it very unconvincing as a distinguishing characteristic.

    For example, here’s a site that starts this way [emphasis mine]:

    Everyone will experience anosmia at some point in their life when afflicted by a cold; we all know that feeling of being bunged up, unable to smell things properly or appreciate food. Whilst the sense of smell usually returns once other symptoms clear, for some people the snotty nose and shivers depart but the lack of smell remains.

    The article goes on to talk about cases in which the problem becomes permanent and/or very long-lasting, which sometimes happens, but that’s not what we’re talking about here.

    There are plenty of other articles that treat loss of smell and/or taste as pretty much a given and a near-universal with most colds and flu (see this for one).

    I agree that loss of taste and/or smell also seems to be a very common COVID symptom, however.

42. neo: However, read the earlier quote, or better yet, read Lewis’s article in its entirety and address what he says. Again, shorter:
    ___________________________________________________

    The British doctors compared notes with doctors from other countries and gathered what data they could. They concluded that roughly 80% of the people who lost their sense of smell would test positive for the coronavirus, and that somewhere between 30% and 60% of those who had tested positive for the virus had also lost their sense of smell.
    ___________________________________________________

    Much of science proceeds on the basis of imperfect data and imperfect tests, but still remarkably useful results can nonetheless be obtained.

    Anosima is not a perfect proxy for Covid. Granted. However, today, right now while Covid is marching through the world, these doctors say that 80% of those who report a loss of the sense of smell will test positive for Covid.

    If so, why is that not useful information today, as opposed to your verdict of “nearly meaningless”?

43. huxley:

    But WHY are they saying it? What is it based on? I have no trouble with the second part of their statement – that 30% to 60% of patients with COVID lose their sense of smell. But I have a great deal of trouble believing that the first part is based on anything that would make sense to me, since flu and colds are far more common than COVID, and loss of smell is a pretty common symptom of flu.

    It is estimated that this year there will be somewhere between 39,000,000 – 55,000,000 cases of flu in this country. Many many of them will temporarily lose their sense of smell. But even if 100% of COVID cases lost their sense of smell, I find it hard to imagine that 80% of people being tested for flu-like symptoms and who also lose sense of smell will have COVID rather than flu. The numbers just don’t make sense to me.

    I read the article you linked and find it extremely unconvincing, and the basis of that 80% figure is not explained. I just don’t think most people experiencing a temporary loss of smell with the flu or a cold even bother to mention it to their doctors, it’s just so common and ordinarily temporary.

    Now, if you can find a study that reports what percentage of people with colds and flu report loss of smell, then that would mean something. But with so many millions getting flu and even more getting colds, even if it’s a pretty small percentage it would be a VERY large number. And if it’s a medium or large percentage, it would be an extraordinarily large number.

44. But WHY are they saying it? What is it based on?

    neo: Since Lewis reports the doctors have put numbers on it I must assume they have conducted studies and come to that conclusion, while you have nothing to offer than your “extremely unconvincing” and “nearly meaningless” opinions on the subject.

    Perhaps the doctors are wrong or perhaps it was only true for two weeks last month or perhaps the doctors are lying perhaps or Lewis is making stuff up. I don’t know for sure. And you don’t either. But I tend not to believe Lewis is lying in a fundamental way here.

    Again, I’ll go with Lewis and his doctors over your opinion.

    I offered the link in good faith as “an article [which] suggests that people self-report the loss of their sense of smell as a rough proxy for Covid infection.” I stand by that.

    If people did self-report their loss of smell and quarantine themselves and experts used the data as a possible proxy for Covid’s spread to learn something, I don’t see the harm and it might do some good or even a great deal of good.

    Doctors and statisticians might be able to spin the straw of a rough proxy into gold.

45. Perhaps “conducted studies” is too strong. Perhaps 80% is a current best guess estimate from the MD trenches Lewis consulted. That doesn’t mean it’s wrong or it shouldn’t be acted upon.

    Covid doesn’t quite fit the old categories and our authorities are consequently nonplussed and often in disagreement.

    Reality is messy.

    But one of our great challenges right now is determining how far Covid is infecting people overall and in specific populations. We are flying blind.

    If Lewis’s doctors’ 80% claim is a reasonably accurate, it could be a big help in finding out where we stand and basically for free.

    Sounds like a bargain to me.

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