I keep finding interesting information I’d missed

Hospital workers know best; German super-spreader event; massive DoD serum repositories and take-aways from The Diamond Princess outbreak.

Carnival celebrations are a big deal in many German cities. One in February 2020 was said to be the country’s first “super-spreader” event.

If you haven’t seen me recently, it’s because I’ve been on some deep Covid research dives. I found several articles and studies I’d previously missed, plus revisited several old files.  Today’s dispatch is my Cliffs notes version of nuggets I found interesting; hopefully, readers will as well. 

New York hospital study validates suspicions of workers

who thought they’d been previously infected

Between April 20 and June 23, 2020, The Northwell Health System, the largest in New York state, offered antibody testing to all health care personnel (HCP) who worked in the five boroughs of New York City

Overall, 5,523 of 40,329 (13.7%) of HCP tested positive for antibodies, meaning these healthcare workers had been previously infected before they gave blood for these tests.

Fourteen percent prevalence was far higher than PCR-confirmed tests in NY City suggested at this time, but what really grabbed my attention was a unique feature of this antibody study.

Researchers asked HCW:  “Do you believe you were infected with COVID-19?” (range, 1-9; 1 = no; 9 = yes definitely; 7-9 = high suspicion).

Among the cohort of antibody-positive workers who had a “high” expectation of having Covid …. 59.2 percent DID test positive.

From the study: “.. high levels of HCP-reported suspicion of virus exposure and prior positive PCR testing results were most strongly associated with seropositivity.”

In fact, thinking you had Covid was a greater predictor of testing positive than previously testing positive via a PCR test.

As I read this, I thought of all the millions of people who think they did have Covid before March 2020, Americans who were told, “Oh no you didn’t. That’s impossible. The experts tell us Covid wasn’t spreading in America until mid to late February.”

Per this scientific study - researchers and experts should have listened to these people.

I definitely did not know this.

From a closer reading of the military’s paper on the USS Kidd Covid outbreak, I was gobsmacked to learn that the military has serum samples of every active duty personnel in the world.

This would mean the Navy and CDC could easily find tens of thousands of “archived” blood samples from, say, February 2020 back through October 2019 to see if there was antibody evidence of early spread.

Here’s the sentence from the Kidd paper that alerted me to this:

“For each crew member who provided a serum specimen, an individually matched serum sample was obtained from the DOD Serum Repository, consisting of the most recent serum sample collected prior to October 2019, which served as a negative control for samples collected during the outbreak.”

Note that this “negative control” tested stored blood from September 2019 or earlier. This would, almost certainly, be before any virus spread began in America. So, IMO, the Navy intentionally tested blood that would probably pre-date virus spread in America.

According to this website, The DODSR

• Currently houses more than 62 million serial blood-derived serum specimens in large state-of-the-art walk-in freezers, and continues to grow by approximately 2.0 million specimens per year.

And the Navy and military maintain the most comprehensive medical database in the world.

About DMED

“DMED provides remote access to a subset of data contained within the Defense Medical Surveillance System. DMSS contains up-to-date and historical data on diseases and medical events (e.g., hospitalizations, ambulatory visits, reportable diseases, etc.) and longitudinal data relevant to personnel characteristics and deployments experience for all active and reserve component service members. The DMED application provides a user-friendly interface to perform queries regarding disease and injury rates and relative burdens of disease in active component populations.”

What this means to my “early spread” research is that if Navy personnel experienced  a spike in ILI symptoms in, say, November 2019 going into March 2020 … the military KNOWS this … But the public certainly doesn’t. 

So the Navy/Military has millions of preserved blood samples that could be tested for antibodies and maintains a medical surveillance system that would tell us if more military personnel (than typical) were experiencing “Covid-like” symptoms … before official Covid.

Why hasn’t any reporter or scientist pointed out both of these facts?

What did the Navy (and CDC) know and when did they know it? Don’t ask what they did investigate; ask what they could and should have investigated … and didn’t. 

I missed this ‘Super-spreader study’ from Germany

There’s a town of 12,597  in Germany called Gangelt that held a Carnival celebration on or around February 15, 2020.

In this community, carnival festivities were followed by a massive outbreak of SARS-CoV2 infections.

According to researchers from the University of Bonn, this Carnival celebration produced a  “super-spreading event.”

According to antibody testing and PCR testing, 15.5 percent of town residents were infected because of this community festival.

I didn’t know of any major “super spreader events” outside of China, northern Italy or the Diamond Princess Cruise ship (see below) that occurred as early as mid-February 2020.

Of the 919 people who tested positive by either an antibody test or PCR test, 45.52 percent had attended the Carnival.

This reminded me of outbreaks on Naval ships and the ILI outbreaks that caused thousands of schools to close in America.

While study authors say this was the first “super spreader” event in Germany, I doubt that’s the case. Still, this event also suggests global “early spread.”

According to official statistics, seven Gangelt residents died “from” Covid. Extrapolating from their sample, authors calculated the Infection Fatality Rate as 0.36, which was much lower than the 1 to 4 percent IFR being hyped at the time.

I’m no epidemiologist, but I’d bet eins gut German beer the real IFR was closer to 0.1 (the IFR for the flu).

Significantly, for residents of this town under the age of 76, the IFR was 0.000 percent.

I know this because I found this information buried in the study: “The mean age of those who died was 80.8, age range 76 years to 85 years.”

So the average Covid victim was 81 and the youngest victim was 76 …. which would be about the same age as …

… The victims of The Diamond Princess cruise ship

The outbreak on the Diamond Princess cruise ship perhaps did as much to elevate Covid fear as any event. It certainly influenced the thinking of Capt. Crozier,  the commanding officer on the USS Roosevelt, who probably (in retrospect) gleaned some of the wrong lessons from the Diamond Princess saga.

(At one time, based in part on lessons from the Diamond Princess, Crozier and a cadre of his top officers thought 50 Roosevelt sailors could die during the outbreak on their ship).

My main take-aways from the Diamond Princess saga are:

- The outbreak apparently started as soon as the ship left port in Tokyo on January 20, 2020 (again, suggesting “early spread.”)

- Passengers were from 56 countries.

- The average age on the ship, including the younger crew members, was 58.

- Depending on the study or story one looks at, from seven to 14 passengers ultimately died. (More than half of the deaths occurred after all passengers had disembarked from the ship on February 23.)

- Except for one possible victim, all of those who died from or with Covid were over the age of 70, with several over age 80. No crew members died. 

- The Infection Fatality Rate for those under age 70 was, again, 0.000 percent. However, the IFR or CFR for those 70 and over was striking and indeed sobering - as much as 18 percent, according to the upper-bound range as cited in one article I read.

- 3,711 crew and passengers were on the ship; about half of the cases were asymptomatic at the time of testing.

- A ^{total of 691 cases had been confirmed as of February 23, meaning 18.6 percent of passengers and crew had been infected.} 

^{- Like the outbreaks on the Roosevelt and Charles de Gaulle aircraft carriers, the Diamond Princess cruise ship seems to prove a very contagious respiratory virus WILL spread widely and rapidly through a ship. No antibody study was done, but I imagine it would have produced positive rates very close to the Roosevelt and de Gaulle - 60 percent.}

UPDATE: This paper from the PANDA organization compares mortality case rates on the Diamond Princess to what happened two months later in New York City. Highly recommended article (not that long). I added a few key excerpts in the Reader Comments section Sept. 1.

^{A left-over oddity from my Roosevelt research …}

^{One oddity of the Roosevelt saga is crew members kept testing positive via PCR test weeks after the ship had arrived in port in Guam on March 27, 2020 … and after the most strident mitigation measures had been implemented, including isolating sailors on the military base or in local hotels.}

^{From a variety of sources, I was able to list the number of positive PCR cases by date.}

Confirmed cases by dates/timeline

March 9, 2020 - Ship leaves Da Nang, Vietnam.

March 13 - (Limited) PCR testing begins.

March 24 - USA Today reports 8 positives.

March 26 - 33 cumulative positive cases.

March 27 (ship arrives in Guam) - 36 confirmed PCR cases.

March 29 - 53 positive cases (Approximately 400 of the 4,800 crew members had been tested; nobody from the ship has been hospitalized.)

April 2nd - large numbers of crew members begin to leave the ship to stay in “isolated” or “quarantined” quarters.

April 9 - 416 cumulative positive cases.

April 13 - Chief Petty Officer Robert Thacker Jr., 41, dies after being found unresponsive April 9. (Thacker had tested positive March 30 and had been been moved to isolated quarters on shore with twice-daily medical checks).

April 16 - 655 positive cases (6 crew members in hospital; one in intensive care).

April 29 - All crew had been tested by PCR (1 crew member remains in hospital).

Total numbers by the time the ship returns to duty in early early June: 1,271 total PCR-positive cases.

What I can’t figure out is why 855 positive tests occurred between April 9 and June 1st (67.3 percent of the total PCR positives).

* 616 positive tests were recorded between April 16 and June 1st (48.5 percent of all positive PCR results happened weeks to months after the ship had docked in Guam.) This would be well after after the isolation and quarantining had gone into full effect by April 2nd and, one would think, after the virus had run through the ship. 

One conclusion: large numbers of these later positive results might have been high-cycle “false positives.”

Antibody testing was done on a sample of crew members between April 20-24. The antibody results showed 60 percent of the crew had already been infected by these dates. It seems many crew members were either becoming re-infected (very doubtful) or the PCR tests were producing curious results.

One of my new maxims: “PCR Testing Commences” = “Outbreak Coming.” 

Conversely, “No PCR testing” = “No outbreaks.”