This means that “herd immunity “ is a non-starter: natural immunity through infection/recovery requires large fractions of the high-risk population to be infected, and vaccines are too far out (economic destruction would occur before vaccines may exist).
We must pursue large-scale testing on a “total war” basis, with the goal of containment and extinguishing the virus.
Herd immunity was a non-started way before this. Just based on death rate it's an insane strategy.
Even if the death rate is 1%, then in the USA, to have even 60% infected and recover, you need to have 192 million infected.
1% death rate = nearly 2 million dead.
But it would be way higher than 1% death rate with these sort of numbers because most of these people are not even getting a hospital bed, never mind ICU.
If young healthy super socieal superspreader people would be grouped together and separated from older people (for example in university colleges), there may be a way to achieve partial herd immunity of people between 18 and 30 years old who prefer to go through the virus instead of wearing masks.
The problem is that even for non-asymptotic people who don't die, just going through the virus sucks a lot and may have long term damages.
even if the death rate is that low, you have to account for the fact that health systems in first world countries are overloading with the initial stages of the spread, leading to more people dying because there's no medical attention to patients who would otherwise make it through the disease.
In Italy they have 10% of people who they know have the virus dying (deliberately not calling this death rate) but they are testing pretty well and that seems very, very high. Can there be 10X more people with the virus than they know about? Not sure.
Also, OK let's call it 0.6%. Only just over a million deaths in the US alone then, even before health systems overwhelmed.
Italy is testing at a rate less than NY. I live in NY and I personally know over a dozen people with presumed COVID-19. Only one has been tested as he is a first responder.. The others are not in the stats. I know this is anecdotal but it appears that there are WAY more people that have this than the official tested positive number.
It seems once this takes a hold in an area that it really gets a lot of people. Me and my wife also had lung congestion, cough and brief fever but will never know if we had it until widespread antibody testing occurs. But it seems very likely there are many more cases than reported and 10x could be possible.
In VA we've done 30,645 tests and have 3,645 confirmed cases. That tells me that 88% of people tested were negative. Either they're spreading a whole lot of "potentially" exposed people or there are a lot of people with symptoms who actually have something else.
Norwegian numbers are similar. Mostly only healthcare providers with symptoms, or close contacts with confirmed cases, have been tested. 95% of the tests are negative.
I'm in London and it's the same here. No-one I know who has symptoms has been tested.
Tipping the scales back the other way - the official deaths only include people dying in hospital, so the true death numbers will be a lot higher, especially places with overloaded hospitals.
There's a study in italy where they think real deaths are double the official count.
> However, journalists and scholars have crunched their own numbers. L’Eco di Bergamo, a newspaper, has obtained data from 82 localities in Italy’s Bergamo province. In March these places had 2,420 more deaths than in March 2019. Just 1,140, less than half of the increase, were attributed to covid-19. “The data is the tip of the iceberg,” Giorgio Gori, the mayor of Bergamo’s capital, told L’Eco. “Too many victims are not included in the reports because they die at home.”
0.6% is maybe 5 years' worth of flu, or about 10 years' worth of road deaths. It's undeniably a disaster, but it's in the same ballpark as things that society shrugs off as normal. If you gave the public a choice between that and 18 months of shelter-in-place, I'm honestly not sure what the right answer would be.
Ugh. We're really still talking about this? It isn't an available choice because all sorts of terminally bad 2nd order things happen when the medical system shuts down. Pitchforks and flaming torches, etc.
Yes, because a giant social experiment where we try to enforce global isolation is not something we should be taking lightly. The approach we should be taking will not be even close to clear until serological testing, and even then it's not going to be obvious. Stop pretending it is.
All sorts of bad things happen when you put everyone under a sustained lockdown for months too. So I'm not convinced that's an available choice either.
The argument of just letting it run its course also assumes that the medical facilities will not be needed for anything _else_ during the epidemic. That's obviously a ridiculous assumption.
This means that “herd immunity “ is a non-starter: natural immunity through infection/recovery requires large fractions of the high-risk population to be infected, and vaccines are too far out (economic destruction would occur before vaccines may exist).
We must pursue large-scale testing on a “total war” basis, with the goal of containment and extinguishing the virus.