COVID19 update, May 15, 2020: interview about German meat processing plants; Santa Clara County immunology study redux

(1) Die Welt (in German) interviewed a Polish guest worker at a German meat processing plant on condition of anonymity. (The interview was conducted in Polish.)
My summary in bullet points:

• almost all line workers are Polish, Romanian, and Bulgarian guest workers hired via subcontractors. No German wants to do that work [and definitely not at that salary]
• we get paid net EUR 6.50 to 9.50 per hour, depending on position. We typically work 12 hours a day, 6 days a week. No bonuses for overtime or weekend work—don’t understand my work contract so I don’t know if I’m entitled. [I’m reminded of the Israeli situation where direct employees of a large enterprise — especially long-standing ones — have lavish benefits, but outsourced subcontractor employees often have none at all.]
• we work as many hours as we can so we can send more money home
• we typically live 2 or even 4 to a room in houses or apartments, typically arranged via the subcontractor. I paid EUR 150/mo. for effectively half a room; meanwhile I learned two bits of German so I was able to rent a place for just myself. We kept our place clean, but some of the Bulgarians and Romanians are withheld EUR 250/mo. from their wages for 4-to-a-room pigsties.
• [He claims] some of the Romanians and Bulgarians can’t read or write in any language, and are hence taken advantage of by the middlemen.
• “we could never in our lives keep 1.5m/5ft distance on the assembly line.” (Title of the article.) “Our stations are 60cm/2ft apart.” They would have to make the line 2.5 times as long for the same productivity.
• Contrary to claims in the media, general hygiene in the plant is good; otherwise, there are disinfectant stations at toilets, cloakrooms, entrances.
• we get fresh cloaks every day, with an RFID tracking chip inside. We ourselves have to carry RFID on our persons. Cloak not returned on end of shift — 30 Euro docked from pay
• masks are mandatory inside now; they used to be optional, but most were wearing them anyhow
• German foremen are generally polite and reasonable, since previous incidents of brutality led to walkouts
• Poland just exempted cross-border commuters from 14-day quarantine, so I’m looking forward to visiting my family for the first time in 8 weeks.

(2) (Hat tip: Cedar Sanderson). Interview with Prof. John Ioannides about the revised version of the Santa Clara County [read: Silicon Valley] immunity study [below: Bendavid et al.]. You can read the paper for yourself here (note the “v2” for Version Two at the end of the URL: the original is still available by substituting “v1”. These kinds of preprint servers keep full version history to avoid “Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia” rewriting of history):
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.14.20062463v2

I think pretty much every serious epidemiologist assumes there is a substantial “Dunkelziffer”/stealth infection rate — the debate is about how big. Truly asymptomatic infection proportions? 22% was reported by German virologist Prof. Hendrik Streeck on his all-community test in a German village; Ref.8 of Bendavid et al. reaches 17.9±2.4% from Diamond Princess data. But this excludes “eh, just a seasonal cough/cold” minimally symptomatic cases, which I suspect are the majority of the Dunkelziffer.

In the current manuscript, they arrive at 1.2% seroprevalence after weighing test performance, and 2.8% (95CI 1.3-4.7%) after adjusting for population demographics.

These prevalence point estimates imply that 54,000 (95CI 25,000 to 91,000 using weighted prevalence; 23,000 with 95CI 14,000-35,000 using unweighted prevalence) people were infected in Santa Clara County by early April, many more than the approximately 1,000 confirmed cases at the time of the survey.

In plain English: the original manuscript claimed there were 50 to 85 “stealth” infections for every documented one, while in the revised version, it may be as low as 14 or as high as 91. OK, let’s apply a simple “Streeck sanity check” here: he proposed using the ratio between the reported case fatality rate (CFR) and his whole-population IFR (infection fatality rate) of about 0.36±0.12% as a crude estimate of how many “stealth” infections are out there for every documented one. From Worldometers data today, I get a 4.1% apparent CFR for California, and 5.6% CFR for Santa Clara County. 5.6 divided by 0.36 leads to about 16:1, though it could be as high as 24:1, consistent with Ioannides’s “unweighted prevalence” data and at the lower end of the 95% confidence interval for weighted prevalence.

(3) Via Erik Wingren, nutritionist Dr. Rhonda Patrick on the wildly popular Joe Rogan Show, speaking on how to boost one’s immune system against infections in general (and thus also COVID19). A commenter summatized the segment as “vitamin D, sauna, sauna,…” Here is a more useful table of contents of the 3-hour podcast.

(4) Israel Hayom, lying around in our condo complex’s lobby, had a headline where outgoing Economics minister Moshe Kaḥlon was quoted as saying: “We sacrificed the economy on the altar of health”. It reminds me of the debate in the US about who is right, Anthony Fauci MD or Senator Rand Paul (R-KY; himself an MD ophthalmologist and a COVID19 survivor). My personal answer: both. They just emphasize opposite scales of the balance. There is no perfect solution here—only a trade-off between different sources of mortality, and the best you can do is try to minimize their sum. Because make no mistake: even the now-disgraced Neil Ferguson (he of the “2 million dead” model that ) acknowledged that continued hard lockdown would engender collateral mortality exceeding any reduction in COVID19 mortality.

(5) Lagniappe: Roger Seheult MD on glutathione deficiency, which brings us back to our previous items on N-acetylcysteine, a.k.a. “NAC”.

ADDENDUM: Israel Institute for Biological Research files for patents on 8 SARS-nCoV-2 antibodies

Antibody tests of two Snohomish County, WA residents push back COVID19 timeline in the USA to probably mid-December.

Marta Hernandez on the ChiCom propaganda machine being turned up to 11. But Peter Zeihan has an interesting out-of-the-box theory about that.