‘Tell me what to do! Please!’: Even experts struggle with coronavirus unknowns - The Washington Post

Brian Nosek, a University of Virginia psychology professor who has devoted his career to making scientific data more reliable and trustworthy, is frustrated.

Nosek has professional expertise in interpreting data, but even he is struggling to make sense of the numbers.

It’s a mess,” said Nosek, who runs the Center for Open Science, which advocates for transparency in research.

Why does SARS-CoV-2 create a devastating disease in some people while leaving others without symptoms or even knowledge that they were infected.

The experts shy away from predictions and instead offer “scenarios.” For example, last week the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a document titled COVID-19 Pandemic Planning Scenarios that offered guidance to public health officials.

“I wish I had any confidence at all in any of the prognostications,” Nosek said.

The agency last Wednesday came out with its latest estimate: 84,891 to 113,138 excess deaths in the United States since Feb.

That death toll does not specify the excess deaths as covid-19 deaths.

The inescapable fact is that roughly 100,000 additional deaths occurred in the United States in a matter of weeks, and did so despite a massive society-wide adoption of social distancing and other preventive measures.

When the CDC put out its guidance last week, it estimated that 0.2 to 1 percent of people who become infected and symptomatic will die.

The agency also gave a best estimate that 35 percent of people infected never develop symptoms.

And tens of millions of people in the United States are at elevated risk because of chronic underlying conditions, such as diabetes and hypertension.

But if the CDC’s “best estimate” is correct and remains constant, and half the people in the United States become infected during the next two years without the introduction of a proven drug treatment or vaccine, that would result in about 426,000 deaths.

The lethality of the virus has been hard to estimate because of the lack of testing and the paucity of solid data on how many people have been infected.

That data is now coming in, however, including a report by researchers at the University of Southern California and the Los Angeles County health department, published in JAMA, that described a survey of Los Angeles County residents who were tested for antibodies to the virus.

The authors estimated that about 4 percent of the population had been infected as of April 10 and 11.

Although the report did not offer an infection fatality rate, lead author Neeraj Sood, a professor of health policy at USC, said it would probably be 0.13 percent for people outside nursing homes and 0.26 percent — identical to the CDC best estimate — when people in nursing homes were included.

A favorite target of right-wing news sites has been an Imperial College model that in late March said 2.2 million people in the United States could eventually die if the country took no measures to halt viral transmission.

They’re a warning sign that this might be a time when you should modify your behavior,” said David Rubin, director of PolicyLab at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, referring to a model his center has produced that shows the counties in the United States most vulnerable to new waves of infection.

“We don’t want to be purveyors of doom,” said Samir Bhatt, a geostatistics expert at Imperial College in London who created a model looking at how reopening the economy could play out across the United States.

Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said in a television interview Friday that if stay-at-home orders were imposed for long, it would cause “irreparable damage,” but he urged people to “please proceed with caution.”.

Jeffrey Shaman, an influential epidemiologist at Columbia University, said that the health of the economy matters, and that the nation needs to restore economic activity in a way that keeps people safe.

She added, “Fear also drives people to think in binary terms such as you are for public health or for the economy; you are for masks or you are reckless.”.

professor, said that “the pandemic has exposed the messiness of science.”.

“We all want answers today, and science is not going to give them,” Nosek said.

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