I for one love it when mouthy oncologists get picked to talk about epedemiology in the Journal.
Next week, tune in for a sculptor's hot take on the Mars lander.
Opinion: We’ll Have Herd Immunity by April
111–120 of 381 posts
Re: Opinion: We’ll Have Herd Immunity by April
#112I really don't think lockdowns have helped a ton in the US. Look at Florida's winter wave of Covid cases vs Massachusetts. The curves are basically identical, despite vastly different pandemic policies. In other countries yes, but in the USA, are there any real data points that can argue that states with strong lockdowns did better than states without? https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/massachusetts-co... h…
Shoot, I’m so grateful to be in a state that was loose with the lockdowns. A friend in another state was frustrated that even the large parks where he lived were locked down. Even in our strictest phase, you could still go to the park and get a little relief from the confines of your home. I cannot imagine how other states are coping where things are much stricter. I am just shocked at the mental component of all thi…
That was definitely a knee-jerk reaction a lot of places did. I don't think very many places in the US have closed down parks at this point.
Re: Opinion: We’ll Have Herd Immunity by April
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
The economic damage is being done by the pandemic: people aren’t going to congregate when it’s risky and many businesses can’t survive without high in-person volume. Having lockdowns can get you back to the point where businesses can safely operate with community spread control measures (see e.g. Australia or Taiwan). What won’t work is attacking medical precautions or dissembling about vaccine effectiveness — and on…
Ah. The ‘it works on an isolated island with 5 million people’ fantasy. Except it doesn’t work on continents with billions of people with multiple governments. And then the magical mask fairytale. If only people had worn masks this would all be over. Except now it turns out people have to wear three masks on top of each other. How could that be if masks had solved all the problems? The answer is clear: they don’t. Th…
Is China an isolated island? How about Vietnam?
And no, land borders don't matter that much. They aren't a strong infection vector. You can just close the borders. The vast majority of infections come from air travel, not land travel that is essentially zero.
Were also not taking about the EU here, the Article is American, and there aren't a billion people neither in Europe nor in North America.
Incidentally, the modalities for the Schengen zone allow authorities to close down borders in such circumstances.
The island argument is a mirage. We're in 2021, land travel can be brought to ~0 and air travel always was the dominant vector of infection.
Re: Opinion: We’ll Have Herd Immunity by April
#114So by April we'll have a new crisis in order to keep the lock-downs rolling.
I have no idea why big business, who supposedly controls the world, would want lockdowns. But in any case, we clearly won't have herd immunity by April, so don't embrace conspiracy theories when lockdowns continue.
Businesses definitely have a huge impact on how democracies function. But COVID has also put ruling parties in many countries in an awkward spot where they are worried about certain vocal parts of the electorate more than the business sector.
The issue is that if ruling parties ease up on restrictions, the opposition will immediately accuse them of "risking lives", "killing grandma", etc. The opposition here might be completely disingenuous, they might be thirsting for an end to restrictions themselves, but they can’t pass up on the opportunity to score points against the ruling party.
In polarized countries, the part of the population that opposes restrictions may even have become a slight majority. But still, as long as the opposition can use any relaxation in restrictions as a means to attack the ruling party and get just a slightly higher percentage of the vote sufficient to unseat the ruling party, the ruling party has little choice but to maintain restrictions.
Re: Opinion: We’ll Have Herd Immunity by April
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
It should be noted that WSJ’s opinion section is extremely politicized. Their regular news desk is separately edited and maintains decently high journalistic standards.
It's pretty weird actually. The news desk for the WSJ is among the best out there. Their news stories tend to be really dry in a good way - full of facts and figures, with very little in the way of click bait hyperbole. Their subscriber model is all about business people who want the details and not opinion... Which then makes the opinion desk at the WSJ a real oddball. It's consistently right-leaning, sometimes to t…
Every time I accidentally stumble on the opinion section, I think to myself "today is the day I cancel my subscription."
I'm hoping they Do Something about it. Just make it a separate $10/month add-on and see what the uptake is.
Re: Opinion: We’ll Have Herd Immunity by April
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
It should be noted that WSJ’s opinion section is extremely politicized. Their regular news desk is separately edited and maintains decently high journalistic standards.
It's pretty weird actually. The news desk for the WSJ is among the best out there. Their news stories tend to be really dry in a good way - full of facts and figures, with very little in the way of click bait hyperbole. Their subscriber model is all about business people who want the details and not opinion... Which then makes the opinion desk at the WSJ a real oddball. It's consistently right-leaning, sometimes to t…
The weirdest part is this leads to frequent items where the Op-Ed page makes factual claims that are directly contradicted by the news section in the same issue.
Re: Opinion: We’ll Have Herd Immunity by April
#117> But the consistent and rapid decline in daily cases since Jan. 8 can be explained only by natural immunity. Why would "natural immunity" kick in this suddenly and effectively? > Behavior didn’t suddenly improve over the holidays; Americans traveled more over Christmas than they had since March. Yes, and then after the holidays they stayed home, so one or two weeks after the traveling seasons there were much fewer i…
yes, "Covid will be mostly gone by April" would mean the beginning April. However, if it's not gone, you can assume the response will be "oh i meant by the end of April".
Re: Opinion: We’ll Have Herd Immunity by April
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, we better destroy the economy with lockdowns while waiting for vaccines that don’t work against these new strains, and then pay the price for herd immunity as well.
It seems the variants are arising in places where people have been mixing and not socially-distancing.
Good luck telling these other governments to lock down to prevent that (assuming it prevents that, of course). That’s the difference between being an isolated nation and being on a continent. You can’t control what the other governments decide.
Re: Opinion: We’ll Have Herd Immunity by April
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
He also uses a fairly low estimate of IFR: > Covid-19 deaths in the U.S. would also suggest much broader immunity than recognized. About 1 in 600 Americans has died of Covid-19, which translates to a population fatality rate of about 0.15%. The Covid-19 infection fatality rate is about 0.23%. These numbers indicate that roughly two-thirds of the U.S. population has had the infection. I usually see numbers like 0.5-0.…
Even if he is correct about the IFR the conclusion he draws is completely wrong. The 0.23 IFR would only be the current IFR. In the real world, the vast majority of the 0.15 % of the population died when the IFR was significantly higher, either due to the initial lack of understanding about the virus such as during the beginning of the pandemic, or due to the fact that even after we had a better understanding the maj…
Also, even if we assume the good doctor is correct about the IFR, any time you try to posit the infection is much more wide-spread than experts believe, to get a lower iFR, you're also implicitly saying that you think the disease is much more virulent, which means the "herd immunity" thresholds are higher.
Re: Opinion: We’ll Have Herd Immunity by April
#120Will we have herd immunity to the variants?
Likely some, but I suspect it won't matter in terms of repoening. Lockdowns have been premised on a light at the end of the tunnel. Humans are too social to live like this indefinitely, and the virus, especially if the vaccines are only somewhat effective, will be good enough.
That said, the vaccines all seem to offer some degree of protection to the variants, naturally acquired immunity probably will too, and the virus will have to adapt to multiple vaccines and natural immunity very quickly to continue spreading.