4 ms·

> That was the initial strategy of herd immunity, and everything we learned about this virus vindicated this strategy. This is just completely wrong. It's a us

> That was the initial strategy of herd immunity, and everything we learned about this virus vindicated this strategy. This is just completely wrong. It's a useful exercise to work out how many people would need to die before herd immunity could be achieved. Use mortality numbers based on what we've learned about the virus and estimates of what percentage of the population would need to be infected to achieve herd immunity based on the behavior of any number of other viruses. And that's assuming infection confers immunity with this virus, which we don't know yet.

cm2187 6y ago
If you are still questioning whether infection confers immunity, then what other strategy than herd immunity do you suggest? If we don’t develop immunity naturally, there won’t be a vaccine either. Permanent lockdown? As for the death rate, the rate to the non vulnerable population is immaterial. With appropriate isolation we could absolutely achieve herd immunity with minimal losses. Instead we have sent covid infected patients back in nursing homes in both the US and the UK with catastrophic results.
- justin66 6y ago
  > As for the death rate, the rate to the non vulnerable population is immaterial. The numbers don't look very immaterial to me. [1] Granted there's a weird amount of variance between regions and there's a lot that isn't certain. > If you are still questioning whether infection confers immunity, then what other strategy than herd immunity do you suggest? If we don’t develop immunity naturally, there won’t be a vaccine either. Permanent lockdown? (Let's hope some reasonable amount of immunity is conferred! It seems likely, but I think it's useful to consider the worst case.) I'd be happy with people doing what they ought to be doing anyway: exercising some caution and doing the obvious things to limit the spreading of the bug. I'm in a constant state of amazement at how bad we are at all of this. In the crazy worst case where there isn't much immunity conferred by the infection, we could hopefully rely on Darwin to eventually provide us with a less dangerous version of the virus. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortality_due_to_COVID-19#Mortality_by_age https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortality_due_to_COVID-19#Mort...
  - myk9001 6y ago
    Do you like good news? Then I have good news! You're looking at the numbers for the case fatality rates (CFR). The CFR is not the same as the infection fatality rates (IFR) which represent "the fatality rate in all those with infection: the detected disease (cases) and those with an undetected disease (asymptomatic and not tested group)... The IFR will always be lower than the CFR..."[1] Spanish government ran a seroprevalence study and got the following estimates of COVID-19's IFR[2]: For the age group under 50, the estimated IFR is about 0.003% For the age group 50 - 69 yo, it's 0.04% And for those over 70, it's 4.1% [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Case_fatality_rate#Terminology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Case_fatality_rate#Terminology [2] https://www.mscbs.gob.es/profesionales/saludPublica/ccayes/alertasActual/nCov-China/documentos/ITCoronavirus.pdf https://www.mscbs.gob.es/profesionales/saludPublica/ccayes/a... Look for the table on page 15
    - justin66 6y ago
      I don't know, an overall IFR of 0.8% is not great news, but thank you for sharing the estimate! (and for reminding me that reading Spanish is not the kind of skill you retain without practicing it every now and then... sigh) Does the document break out IFR-S? Some news came out in recent days indicating IFR-S in the United States was around 1.3%.
      - myk9001 6y ago
        "I don't know, an overall IFR of 0.8% is not great news" I agree, 4% IFR of people over 70 is a scary number. In my opinion, governments around the world should really focus on protecting these people. The good news is for people under 70 personal danger from the virus is close to zero. "Does the document break out IFR-S?" Don't know, sorry. Deciphering that table is really easy as the column names are almost the same as the English terms. And Google Translate does a really good job on the footnotes. But reading the whole paper I'll have to leave to someone who actually reads Spanish.
        justin66 6y ago

cm2187 6y ago

If you are still questioning whether infection confers immunity, then what other strategy than herd immunity do you suggest? If we don’t develop immunity naturally, there won’t be a vaccine either. Permanent lockdown? As for the death rate, the rate to the non vulnerable population is immaterial. With appropriate isolation we could absolutely achieve herd immunity with minimal losses. Instead we have sent covid infected patients back in nursing homes in both the US and the UK with catastrophic results.

justin66 6y ago
> As for the death rate, the rate to the non vulnerable population is immaterial. The numbers don't look very immaterial to me. [1] Granted there's a weird amount of variance between regions and there's a lot that isn't certain. > If you are still questioning whether infection confers immunity, then what other strategy than herd immunity do you suggest? If we don’t develop immunity naturally, there won’t be a vaccine either. Permanent lockdown? (Let's hope some reasonable amount of immunity is conferred! It seems likely, but I think it's useful to consider the worst case.) I'd be happy with people doing what they ought to be doing anyway: exercising some caution and doing the obvious things to limit the spreading of the bug. I'm in a constant state of amazement at how bad we are at all of this. In the crazy worst case where there isn't much immunity conferred by the infection, we could hopefully rely on Darwin to eventually provide us with a less dangerous version of the virus. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortality_due_to_COVID-19#Mortality_by_age https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortality_due_to_COVID-19#Mort...
- myk9001 6y ago
  Do you like good news? Then I have good news! You're looking at the numbers for the case fatality rates (CFR). The CFR is not the same as the infection fatality rates (IFR) which represent "the fatality rate in all those with infection: the detected disease (cases) and those with an undetected disease (asymptomatic and not tested group)... The IFR will always be lower than the CFR..."[1] Spanish government ran a seroprevalence study and got the following estimates of COVID-19's IFR[2]: For the age group under 50, the estimated IFR is about 0.003% For the age group 50 - 69 yo, it's 0.04% And for those over 70, it's 4.1% [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Case_fatality_rate#Terminology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Case_fatality_rate#Terminology [2] https://www.mscbs.gob.es/profesionales/saludPublica/ccayes/alertasActual/nCov-China/documentos/ITCoronavirus.pdf https://www.mscbs.gob.es/profesionales/saludPublica/ccayes/a... Look for the table on page 15
  - justin66 6y ago
    I don't know, an overall IFR of 0.8% is not great news, but thank you for sharing the estimate! (and for reminding me that reading Spanish is not the kind of skill you retain without practicing it every now and then... sigh) Does the document break out IFR-S? Some news came out in recent days indicating IFR-S in the United States was around 1.3%.
    - myk9001 6y ago
      "I don't know, an overall IFR of 0.8% is not great news" I agree, 4% IFR of people over 70 is a scary number. In my opinion, governments around the world should really focus on protecting these people. The good news is for people under 70 personal danger from the virus is close to zero. "Does the document break out IFR-S?" Don't know, sorry. Deciphering that table is really easy as the column names are almost the same as the English terms. And Google Translate does a really good job on the footnotes. But reading the whole paper I'll have to leave to someone who actually reads Spanish.
      - justin66 6y ago