5 ms·

not true - infection rate grows sigmoidal and not exponential. that's why at the moment you can observe a stabilization despite few changes in regulation as of

not true - infection rate grows sigmoidal and not exponential. that's why at the moment you can observe a stabilization despite few changes in regulation as of now compared to the summer. infection spread saturates periodically after suceptible clusters are depleted. what would make sense is a steady and controlled Durchseuchung with specific protection of vulnerable people (like old and sick) - b/c the best immunity is gained by infection. but Durchseuchung never sounded good - that's why that term got so popular. it sounds ugly and brutal. but it's what was happening all the time with many diseases in the past thousands of years.

13415 5y ago
That's a bit misleading. As long as the R value is above 1 the spreading is exponential. That follows directly from how the R-value is defined. What you mean is that the curve will take a sigmoidal shape for a while once the number of immune people has reached a certain threshold. In that case, the R-value is slowly approaching 1 again, and finally will go below 1 (which finally results in a curve that is not sigmoidal, of course). Other measures like lockdowns do the same to the curve, as is easy to observe by overlaying the measures over the curve, just not with an initial increase of cases that leads to hundreds of thousands of deaths. Estimated Infection Fatality Rates during the first Covid wave - where there was full hospital care available - ranged from 0.5% to 2%. So for Germany's 80M people that would be in the ballpark of 400,000 to 1.6M deaths - under medical care. Even if you take the original estimates of around 0.3% the results wouldn't have been flattering. In a nutshell, the German government and every other country on earth is doing what you propose, except that they are vaccinating at the same time and try to keep the curves flat (but your use of "slow" also suggests this, so it's not clear what else you're suggesting).
- ipaddr 5y ago
  Exponential implies a doubling of R value. Starting with an R value of 1.1 the length of time required for doubling of the infected population is longer than other factors which will lower the R value to under 1.
- School-Cotton 5y ago
  > As long as the R value is above 1 the spreading is exponential No, this is only true if the R value is constant in time. Not all functions with a positive first derivative are the exponential function.
  - gugagore 5y ago
    Are you talking about a situation where the R value approaches 1 from above? e.g. R(t) = 1 + 1/t? Because otherwise the growth is indeed exponential, yeah?
    - School-Cotton 5y ago
      That’s one possibility, but there’s no reason it has to converge to 1 (i.e. linear). R(t) = 100/t is also not exponential. Of course, the epidemic curve described by that function would indeed bounded below by an exponential function on part of its range, but the same is true of any function with positive derivative, and calling for example f(x) = x^2 exponential for that reason makes the term meaningless. This is presumably what the OP meant by “as long as R>1, the curve is exponential”. But this is literally equivalent to saying “as long as f’(x) > 0, f is exponential” which is just not a useful concept.
      - 13415 5y ago
        You're nitpicking out of context, I didn't give a definition of an exponential function, I was talking about the spreading of the Covid 19 disease. For example, the R0 value of SARS-CoV-2 was estimated 5.8 in the US and "...between 3.6 and 6.1 in the eight European countries"[1] Obviously, it depends on many factors like population density and contacts of persons/day, but generally the disease will start spreading exponentially with R_t values approaching this number or staying constant. The initial spreading will be exponential in the beginning - as every actual curve illustrates - if the disease is left unchecked as OP suggested, until R_t values go down again due to immunity. That's all I meant to say. [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022519321000436 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002251932...
crooked-v 5y ago
> b/c the best immunity is gained by infection That doesn't help if you die of the infection first, and COVID is extremely lethal among the demographics that most need the direct benefits of immunity.
- prohobo 5y ago
  That's not what they're saying. They're saying we should have protected those demographics and let the rest get infected.
gattilorenz 5y ago
> the best immunity is gained by infection. Source? I think there's plenty of peer-reviewed scientific articles claiming the opposite.
- rimliu 5y ago
  So do not think, and go and look. Turns out that's exactly what scientists have been saying for a few months already.
  - gattilorenz 5y ago
    I think the first person doing the claim should provide evidence, but anyway: http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseases/coronavirus/covid-natural-immunity-what-you-need-to-know http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-disease... Here you can find linked three studies by the CDC that support the idea that natural immunity is harder to get and less effective (besides, as others have said, there's the non trivial chance of side effects or not even surviving the virus) I don't care about what the "experts" think or say, I care about studies. Update: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02795-x#ref-CR5 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02795-x#ref-CR5 reports many studies that claim that we should be vaccinating people after a natural infection to get "super immunity", but that is different from what the OP was claiming (natural immunity > vaccine immunity)
- m4rtink 5y ago
  Even if it was, it still means risking death or permanent organ damage + good chance of passing the infection to others. Not the best value proposition & definitely not webscale.
- manwe150 5y ago
  I think it could be technically accurate, if you include that vaccination before getting infected gives better immunity than most other options. (It is almost like a booster shot, but worse in almost every possibly way) Also probably true without the vaccine first, but the initial survival rate without vaccination is a lot lower.
- 5y ago

13415 5y ago

That's a bit misleading. As long as the R value is above 1 the spreading is exponential. That follows directly from how the R-value is defined. What you mean is that the curve will take a sigmoidal shape for a while once the number of immune people has reached a certain threshold. In that case, the R-value is slowly approaching 1 again, and finally will go below 1 (which finally results in a curve that is not sigmoidal, of course). Other measures like lockdowns do the same to the curve, as is easy to observe by overlaying the measures over the curve, just not with an initial increase of cases that leads to hundreds of thousands of deaths. Estimated Infection Fatality Rates during the first Covid wave - where there was full hospital care available - ranged from 0.5% to 2%. So for Germany's 80M people that would be in the ballpark of 400,000 to 1.6M deaths - under medical care. Even if you take the original estimates of around 0.3% the results wouldn't have been flattering. In a nutshell, the German government and every other country on earth is doing what you propose, except that they are vaccinating at the same time and try to keep the curves flat (but your use of "slow" also suggests this, so it's not clear what else you're suggesting).

ipaddr 5y ago
Exponential implies a doubling of R value. Starting with an R value of 1.1 the length of time required for doubling of the infected population is longer than other factors which will lower the R value to under 1.
School-Cotton 5y ago
> As long as the R value is above 1 the spreading is exponential No, this is only true if the R value is constant in time. Not all functions with a positive first derivative are the exponential function.
- gugagore 5y ago
  Are you talking about a situation where the R value approaches 1 from above? e.g. R(t) = 1 + 1/t? Because otherwise the growth is indeed exponential, yeah?
  - School-Cotton 5y ago
    That’s one possibility, but there’s no reason it has to converge to 1 (i.e. linear). R(t) = 100/t is also not exponential. Of course, the epidemic curve described by that function would indeed bounded below by an exponential function on part of its range, but the same is true of any function with positive derivative, and calling for example f(x) = x^2 exponential for that reason makes the term meaningless. This is presumably what the OP meant by “as long as R>1, the curve is exponential”. But this is literally equivalent to saying “as long as f’(x) > 0, f is exponential” which is just not a useful concept.
    - 13415 5y ago
      You're nitpicking out of context, I didn't give a definition of an exponential function, I was talking about the spreading of the Covid 19 disease. For example, the R0 value of SARS-CoV-2 was estimated 5.8 in the US and "...between 3.6 and 6.1 in the eight European countries"[1] Obviously, it depends on many factors like population density and contacts of persons/day, but generally the disease will start spreading exponentially with R_t values approaching this number or staying constant. The initial spreading will be exponential in the beginning - as every actual curve illustrates - if the disease is left unchecked as OP suggested, until R_t values go down again due to immunity. That's all I meant to say. [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022519321000436 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002251932...

crooked-v 5y ago

> b/c the best immunity is gained by infection That doesn't help if you die of the infection first, and COVID is extremely lethal among the demographics that most need the direct benefits of immunity.

prohobo 5y ago
That's not what they're saying. They're saying we should have protected those demographics and let the rest get infected.

gattilorenz 5y ago

> the best immunity is gained by infection. Source? I think there's plenty of peer-reviewed scientific articles claiming the opposite.

rimliu 5y ago
So do not think, and go and look. Turns out that's exactly what scientists have been saying for a few months already.
- gattilorenz 5y ago
  I think the first person doing the claim should provide evidence, but anyway: http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseases/coronavirus/covid-natural-immunity-what-you-need-to-know http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-disease... Here you can find linked three studies by the CDC that support the idea that natural immunity is harder to get and less effective (besides, as others have said, there's the non trivial chance of side effects or not even surviving the virus) I don't care about what the "experts" think or say, I care about studies. Update: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02795-x#ref-CR5 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02795-x#ref-CR5 reports many studies that claim that we should be vaccinating people after a natural infection to get "super immunity", but that is different from what the OP was claiming (natural immunity > vaccine immunity)
m4rtink 5y ago
Even if it was, it still means risking death or permanent organ damage + good chance of passing the infection to others. Not the best value proposition & definitely not webscale.
manwe150 5y ago
I think it could be technically accurate, if you include that vaccination before getting infected gives better immunity than most other options. (It is almost like a booster shot, but worse in almost every possibly way) Also probably true without the vaccine first, but the initial survival rate without vaccination is a lot lower.
5y ago