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Excellent work, and I hope more people in other cities start running these calculations. > In the hypothesis - not at all remote - that all citizens of Nembro
by graeme 7y ago
Excellent work, and I hope more people in other cities start running these calculations.
> In the hypothesis - not at all remote - that all citizens of Nembro have caught the virus (with many asymptomatic, therefore), 158 deaths would equate to a lethality rate of 1%. That is precisely the expected and measured lethality rate on the Diamond Princess cruise ship and - made proportionally by demographic structure - in South Korea. We have made exactly the same calculation for the municipalities of Cernusco sul Naviglio (Mi) and Pesaro using exactly the same methodology. In Cernusco the number of anomalous deaths is equal to 6.1 times those officially attributed to Covid-19, also in Pesaro 6.1 times. But even more staggering are the Bergamo figures, where the ratio reaches 10.4.
This seems an unreasonable assumption, no? I don’t think any models predict a 100% infection rate: herd immunity would kick in beforehand, at the least.
If true, then the death counts and death rates would be higher. E.g. with 50% infection, deaths are 4x, 12x and 20x, and the death rate is 2%.
Of course, you also have to account for local demographics.
Edit: I checked the numbers for Bergamo, and they’re troubling. It’s a city of 122,000, and it has a 0.5% death rate for the whole city.
Further, people are still sick and dying, so these death rates will only go up.
- csomar 7y agoShouldn't the Covid-19 be immune to herd-immunity though because of the very long incubation time, during which you can still transmit the virus?
- maxander 7y agoHerd immunity kicks in when a large fraction of the people you encounter were already infected, giving you fewer chances to infect new people. So incubation time doesn’t matter there (though certainly it doesn’t help, for other reasons.)
- ORioN63 7y ago> Herd immunity kicks in when a large fraction of the people you encounter were already infected Alternatively, immunized people.
- Gibbon1 7y agoI think there is a momentum effect if the percentage of infectious people gets high enough. Where you overshoot the static herd-immunity threshold. If you can keep the number of infected below 10% then you don't see it. At least that's what I saw when I tried to model it. (Take that as you will).
- stonogo 7y agoNaturally-occurring herd immunity is a temporary effect. Only artifically-imposed herd immunity (i.e. vaccination) is lasting.
- graeme 7y agoYes, but unless herd immunity lasts only a couple weeks that shouldn’t be a factor in these Italian analyses. The infection spread over a short period.
- ShorsHammer 7y agoWhat a ridiculously incorrect statement. SARS back in 2002 only lasted 3 flu seasons before being entirely wiped out naturally. SARS-CoV-2 which we are dealing with here is a related virus. > No cases of the first SARS-CoV have been reported worldwide since 2004. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndr... https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/sars/ https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/sars/
- wtallis 7y agoI'm not seeing how the information you cite forms a counterargument against the comment you replied to. Did you mean to post this elsewhere?
- ShorsHammer 7y agoOriginal comment: > Naturally-occurring herd immunity is a temporary effect. Reply: > No cases of the first SARS-CoV have been reported worldwide since 2004. No I very much intended to write it here. Which part of this interaction needs more explaining?
- endorphone 7y agoNaturally? SARS was wiped out through unprecedented containment efforts by a multitude of nations. Its annihilation was very much artificial and was extraordinarily costly.
- scarmig 7y agoIIRC the level at which herd immunity effects start kicking in is dependent on how contagious a given virus is. For an entire village to be infected in less than a month requires a very, very high R0 (one that's higher than has been reported so far), which would mean that herd immunity would likely kick in at >0.9. I don't think an R0 that high is plausible, which suggests that only a fraction of the population has been infected in Nembro. That, unfortunately, suggests an even higher mortality rate, at least when the medical system is overloaded. The decline would then be due to the effectiveness of quarantine measures.
- aparashk 7y agoFully agree: 100% infection for everyone is very unlikely, everything considered.
- buboard 7y agohow is this excellent work? it's unscientific conjecture based on eyeballing some extrapolated data
- graeme 7y agoIt’s excellent in the sense that no one has done this sort of analysis yet. We’re flying in the dark due to constraints of testing. The hope would be that by publishing this work, more people in other cities are prompted to analyze excess deaths and note whether there are any abnormalities during the time the pandemic hit locally.