The Homa Files

Estimate: 3% of the NY state population are infected asymptomatics .. in circulation and potentially infecting others.
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In my business analytics course, I used to nudge students to “squeeze the rock” .. to get as much possible information out of each test or piece of data.

OK, let’s apply that principle today …

In a prior post, I opined that NY antibody tests were missing an information opportunity.  If they also swabbed the random sample for C-19 diagnostic tests, they’d also have an estimate of the number of infected asymptomatics who are currently in circulation in NY.

• For more, see: NY’s missed testing opportunity

OK, it was a missed opportunity.

But, let’s not fret.

We can squeeze the data to get a rough-cut estimate of  the number of infected asymptomatics who are currently in circulation in NY.

Let’s do some arithmetic …

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Let’s start with the data that we previously extracted  from the first set of NY antibody tests.

• For details and discussion see: NY antibody test results

The key number is the number of infected asymptomatics — the number of people testing positive for antibodies less the number of confirmed cases (i.e. the  severe symptomatics) … projected up to the state’s population.

That number is 2,417,039 … call it 2.4 million.

Said differently, based on these test results,  90% of New Yorkers who have gotten infected by C-19 have had no or mild symptoms. That’s a big deal.. perhaps the key takeaway from these test results!

Those people aren’t currently infected … they were infected previously.

Let’s assume that they were infected at an even frequency over March and April … call it an 8 week period.

Then, we can assume that approximately 300,000 were infected each week.

And, if we assume that the virus stays with each of them for 2 weeks (i.e. the designated quarantine period) … then we can estimate that 600,000 (2 weeks times 300,000 per week) were infected at any one time during the the 8-week period.

That means that at any one time during the the 8-week period. about 3% of the New York’s 19.4 million population consisted of infected asymptomatics who were in circulation …. potentially infecting others.

That’s for NY state . . for NYC, a best guess would be 4.5% since, proportionately, 50% more people tested positive for antibodies in NYC then the state average.

What’s the “so what” ?

Is 3% a big number or a little number?

Regardless, what are the implications?

Stay tuned, I’m working on that…

This entry was posted on April 24, 2020 at 10:00 am and is filed under Coronavirus - Covid 19, Covid-19 Testing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.