AI Program Claims To Predict COVID-19 Death Rate With 90 Percent Accuracy (thenextweb.com) 61
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Next Web: Scientists from the University of Copenhagen have developed an AI tool that can predict who'll die from COVID-19 with up to 90% accuracy. It also predicted whether someone who's admitted to hospital with COVID-19 will need a respirator with 80% accuracy. The researchers fed the system health data from almost 4,000 COVID-19 patients in Denmark to train it to find patterns in their medical histories. Unsurprisingly, BMI and age were the most decisive indicators. But the study also showed that males and people with high blood pressure or a neurological disease had an elevated risk. The next most influential health factors were having chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), asthma, diabetes, and heart disease. The study paper has been published in the journal Nature.
Over 80? (Score:1)
Yeah...over 80. Does this mean I am AI?
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More bullcrap (Score:1, Troll)
Vitamin D deficiency not measured which is as dumb as fuck considering it is a bigger co-morbidity than any mentioned.
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Vitamin D deficiency not measured which is as dumb as fuck
Unless the 2.6 million Danish citizens in the population they studied all had Vitamin D tests done, they don't have that information.
Turns out that you can only do statistics on the information you have, not the information you don't have.
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The study is pointless if they're going to ignore the elephant in the room.
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The study is pointless if they're going to ignore the elephant in the room.
Give me a break. Unless you've got some proof that the group that was studied is any better off than the rest of the planet, there's a damn good chance damn near everyone is Vitamin D "deficient" vs. COVID.
Just ask everyone selling vitamins right now.
Also, this was more a study to determine who would need advanced treatment or faces death based on who holds a common co-morbidity. Trying to determine who will come out on the awesome end of the COVID spectrum based on Vitamin-D boosting is like asking for V
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People who are vitamin D deficient are 15 times more likely than average to die. No other co-morbidity comes close.
In another study, 50 people were treated with vitamin D in the form that it is in the blood after the body has fully processed it, those 50 people were 25 times less likely to need intensive care than the 26 people in the control group. If you think you can dismiss that as pure coincidence then you're come kind of moron.
It's been measured in several different ways and every time it's been prove
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Well, obviously you've solved this pandemic.
With your cure, I expect everything will be back to normal within a matter of weeks.
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It's been solved since before it began. It's been known for decades that most people in temperate climates are deficient in vitamins C and D, and that said deficiency makes the immune system largely ineffective against viral pathogens.
Yes, many foods are fortified with one or both of these, but, generally, only in the amounts necessary to prevent scurvy and rickets respectively and NOT the amounts needed for optimal immune function.
We have been and are being lied to, by omission as well as misleading and f
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Great! Get the word out!
The pandemic will be over in a few days.
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and yet you don’t link to a single source?
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MMR jab gives some immunity, (the mumps part, which lasts 10 years)
https://mbio.asm.org/content/1... [asm.org]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Vitamin D, deficiency correlation with COVID severity
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p... [nih.gov] "Vitamin D can prevent COVID-19 infection-induced multiple organ damage"
https://www.sciencedirect.com/... [sciencedirect.com] "Effect of calcifediol treatment and best available therapy versus best available therapy on intensive care unit admission and mortality among patients hospitalized for COVID-19: A pilot
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I'm certainly no expert, so take this with as big a grain of salt as you want, but proving causation on that might be difficult.
From TFA, comorbidities include BMI, age, high-blood pressure, neurological disease,COPD, asthma, diabetes, and heart disease.
Well those conditions are also closely linked to people who either don't get outside and exercise or who CAN'T get outside and exercise.
So you would expect most people in those groups to have lower than average levels vitamin D.
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How's it difficult to understand that people are 20+ times more likely to die if they are vitamin D deficient. Easy to prove and it's been proven several times in several studies.
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If this model predicts with 90 percent accuracy without using vitamin D, then it's not a huge factor in the population that was studied.
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Where do you think people in the hospitals come from, Mars?
WTF is it with people jumping through mental hoops in able to disbelieve the simple fact that people are dying from COVID because they are vitamin D deficient.
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I'm honestly not certain, are you trolling?
Are you saying there is evidence that giving Vitamin D supplementation to people who have low levels of Vitamin D improves their survival rates from dying of COVID?
e.g.:
Take an overweight, elderly male who has COPD. Statistically speaking, that person is not going to be exercising much and is not going to be outside much. People who do not go outside much have low levels of Vitamin D.
So, is it the lack of Vitamin D that increases his fatality risk from COVID, or is
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Every time I talk about Vitamin D I get attacked by many people, I don't know why but there is some major groupthink going on, some thing that prevents people from believing that a vitamin can be important.
Vitamin D is essential to the immune system, especially fighting viruses. In northern hemisphere countries there is typically over 50% of the population that get vitamin-D deficient during winter, there are countless studies on this, a quick google can confirm that.
Re your example, those are all co-morbid
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Mostly agreed. Vitamin D deficiency is extremely common, and causes suboptimal immune system function.
Sun is the best way to get vitamin D, for those who can get that.
I certainly recommend supplementation for most folks, but the trick is that the optimal oral dose varies a lot by person, due to wide differences in how vitamin D is absorbed and processed. Ideally, you want to get blood testing to determine the correct oral dose necessary to optimize vitamin D levels in the blood.
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Just take 100mcg a day, that's the maximum advised safe level and it's a small fraction of what you'd get in 20 minutes sunbathing on a hot day. It's hard to overdose on vitamin D supplements, you'd have to down a whole bottle full of high strength pills every day and even then it's be weeks to months before you needed hospital treatment. Look up vitamin D overdose, it's rare and takes extreme measures.
Vitamin D is fat soluble, supplements are best taken 20 minutes after eating fatty foods, one study said i
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100mcg / 4000IU should be safe for adults and teens, but I'm not convinced it is enough for everyone, especially for older folks who just don't absorb most nutrients as well as they used to.
I guess it's as good a place to start as any, but I'd still want blood testing to make sure that optimal blood levels (at least 100ng/mL) are being achieved.
(Standard disclaimer: I'm not a doctor or medical professional; I'm not *your* doctor or medical professional; I don't play one on TV or Youtube; this isn't medical
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Every time I talk about Vitamin D I get attacked by many people, I don't know why but there is some major groupthink going on, some thing that prevents people from believing that a vitamin can be important.
Is anyone attacking you? I'm certainly not. My point is just that it's hard to prove the CAUSAL relationship between Vitamin D levels and Covid, because the the same set of comorbidities that cause people to have low levels of Vitamin D also are known to directly cause worse Covid outcomes. So far as I have read or seen anywhere, low levels of Vitamin D -- excluding any comorbidities -- is not known to cause worse outcomes.
Like I said in another post, there is a way to test this. Take a group of people admi
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It has been done (double blind), the people treated with vitamin D were 25 times less likely to need intensive care treatment.
Vitamin D, deficiency correlation with COVID severity
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ [nih.gov]
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Thanks for the links.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p... [nih.gov] "Vitamin D can prevent COVID-19 infection-induced multiple organ damage"
This a letter that speculates Vitamin D could be useful. Very interesting, but not a test.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/... [sciencedirect.com] "Effect of calcifediol treatment and best available therapy versus best available therapy on intensive care unit admission and mortality among patients hospitalized for COVID-19: A pilot randomized clinical study"
Again, very interesting (and encouraging results), but a very small sample size and it's unclear to me how controlled the variables were. Vitamin D group was picked randomly, so it's very possible that the people who did not receive Vitamin D started off sicker or had more comborbdities. The end of the page: "Calcifediol seems to be able to reduce severity of the disease, but larger trials with gro
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I think the numbers speak for themselves, of the 50 randomly selected people who received vitamin D only 2 went into ICU whilst of the 26 people who didn't get vitamin D, half ended up in ICU and 2 died.
That's a roughly 25-fold improvement in outcome.
If the deaths from COVID could be reduced 25-fold we could get on with our lives with sensible precautions (masks, 2m distancing where possible).
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Actually, I found that one such study has occurred:
https://www.medrxiv.org/conten... [medrxiv.org]
This study seems to indicate that Vitamin D supplementation does not help at the point of hospitalization.
Supplementation earlier in the process (e.g., before infection) would be substantially harder to test.
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There are different ways of supplementing, supplementing with Vitamin D in the form that you buy it from the chemist would be useless short term. Calcifediol is the form the body's immune system uses, the study I linked showed how effective it is. Vitamin D3 that you buy from the shop/chemist takes a month or 2 to build up in the body.
I checked the page you linked, they f**d up and used the wrong form of vitamin d, they didn't use Calcifediol - the form of vitamin D as it is in the blood after it's been pro
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So, is it the lack of Vitamin D that increases his fatality risk from COVID
yes [bostonherald.com]
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Nothing in that article says anything about any causal links between Vitamin D levels, comorbidities, and COVID.
A testable scenario would be to take a group of people with low Vitamin D levels who are admitted to the hospital with COVID. Treat some of them with Vitamin D, and see if there's any difference in outcomes.
If Vitamin D alone is enough to improve outcomes, awesome, that's a cheap and easy treatment.
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While vitamin D is of interest, your statistic is meaningless. Majority of people have vitamin D levels lower than 20 ng/ml and I imagine a COVID patient who's hospitalized for a few weeks until they expire doesn't get a lot of sunlight. If a hospital gave vitamin D supplements to all their patients to keep their level above 20, then 100% of patients who die will have vitamin D levels above 20.
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No, your post is stupid.
There is nothing meaningless about the fact that people are dying because they are vitamin D deficient. There have been several studies showing this. The human immune system needs vitamin D to work well and unlike other vitamins, minerals, enzymes etc it's not something that is in abundance in diet.
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Please go away and peddle your demented pseudo-science somewhere else.
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If this is "demented pseudo-science" then what do you think is actual science?
MMR jab gives some immunity, (the mumps part, which lasts 10 years)
https://mbio.asm.org/content/1... [asm.org]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Vitamin D, deficiency correlation with COVID severity
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p... [nih.gov] "Vitamin D can prevent COVID-19 infection-induced multiple organ damage"
https://www.sciencedirect.com/... [sciencedirect.com] "Effect of calcifediol treatment and best available therapy versus best available therapy on intensive care
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I'd like to hear your honest opinion as to why you don't think vitamin D3 could play an important part with respect to the COVID19 outbreak. There is a lot of very strong science with respect to vitamin D and the human immune system particularly upper respiratory tract diseases. There is also a lot of research that proves a strong link between vitamin D deficiency and COVID19 symptoms and mortality rates.
So I would honestly like to know why you would think this is "demented pseudo-science ", what is it that
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Fuck off you idiot, he's a very experience doctor who trains other doctors and has done medical research in the past.
Good news, everyone! (Score:2)
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Indeed, and levels of poisonous vitriol vis-a-vis the White House denizen are down an order or two of magnitude.
FD. Conservative here, yet, losing a Presidential election that will harm your income stream is not always the worst possible outcome.
Moral? You're doing yourself, and ultimately your countrymen, a complete and utter disservice when you vote for your team despite the fact that they suck like deepthroat.
Age--how exactly does it matter? (Score:3)
Age was the most important predictive feature, but what were the specific trends? I couldn't find any info about this in the article or the paper. For instance, is mortality linear with age? How are non-severe hypertension or BMI associated with mortality? The article seems like it was meant to inform us about the predictor, but not to inform us about COVID.
On another note, I've been trying to break the habit of thinking of accuracy, but instead considering specificity and sensitivity. How does one read an article like this and interpret in the more statistically rigorous way? If there is no information about false negatives (only false positives), can we even tell whether the system is useful?
No way yet to tell how useful machine learning is (Score:2)
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Thank you for the graph and info!
I meant a false negative being when the algorithm does not say someone will need ICU admission but they do end up needing it. So when the article says this predictor has up to 90% accuracy, I don't know what to make of that. Does it mean 90% of the people the predictor said would need to go to ICU actually did need it (with 10% false positives)?
But after thinking about it more, the details may not matter as much in determining whether the system is useful, because the base r
In our local retirement home (Score:2)
They have a cat that has been doing this for years.
Hal (Score:2)
But I said putting it in control of the ventilator was a mistake!
Overfitted AI (Score:1)
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And make headlines!
Predicting the past... (Score:1)
It's always important to be able to predict the past to a high level of certainty.