Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Opinion: We’ll Have Herd Immunity by April

wsj.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 381 posts

Re: Opinion: We’ll Have Herd Immunity by April

#121

Post by EricE »

acdha wrote: post #87
tinus_hn wrote: post #75

Earlier 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.

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…

"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)."

How do you explain Florida, not locked down, vs. California with some of the strictest lock downs in the country having similar rates of death/infection?

It's even more of a puzzler for those pushing lockdowns since Florida has a population tilted way more in the elderly direction and per capita CA has a population tilted way more in the younger direction. Even if both were locked down you would expect Florida to have more infections simply from the age of its population. Instead they aren't locked down so it should be the apocalypse, no?

All as we pass the year anniversary of "six weeks to slow the spread" :p

Re: Opinion: We’ll Have Herd Immunity by April

#122

Post by verytrivial »

thehappypm wrote: post #91

I 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…

Yep, it turns out the last 5-10% of compliance and classifications of valid exceptions to policy actually DOES matter for high-R respitory infections. That has always been true, but before SARS-Cov-2 it didn't matter as much.

And if, say, the US just happens to have a permanant 10% of the population who bristle as anything related to "compliance", you simply can not contain these respitory infections, at best only slow them a bit.

Re: Opinion: We’ll Have Herd Immunity by April

#123

Post by worker767424 »

Urgo wrote: post #21

While I'd love to believe that herd immunity is almost here or the vaccine is effectively stopping the spread already, I think the biggest reason for the drop in new cases as well as the drop in active cases can be summed up in a single word. Christmas. Or more broadly the holiday season. It's absolutely true that new cases are dropping and active cases are dropping as well but if you look at active cases everything…

This doesn't explain why new cases started surging in early November, unless you want to put that on Halloween. Even then, new infections where rising all of October. I'd also argue there weren't clear post-holiday surges beyond people delaying tests.

Re: Opinion: We’ll Have Herd Immunity by April

#124

Post by Zimahl »

chasd00 wrote: post #117
tom_mellior wrote: post #64

> 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".

You have to love those moving goalposts.

Re: Opinion: We’ll Have Herd Immunity by April

#125

Post by DyslexicAtheist »

ttul wrote: post #92
danfo wrote: post #25

> Herd immunity has been well-documented in the Brazilian city of Manaus, where researchers in the Lancet reported the prevalence of prior Covid-19 infection to be 76%, resulting in a significant slowing of the infection. What, the linked study proves the opposite. A massive amount of death in Manaus in 2021, despite 'herd immunity' measured in October 2020. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-…

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.

isn't OP-ed synonym for what they generally disagree with (e.g. to allow them to claim they're "listening to both sides") ?

relevant example from this week is Australia, where editor in chief for the Murdoch conglomerate has no answer to why they banish all articles about climate change science to the Opinions sections.

https://twitter.com/ChaplainheArt/status/1363168269599973382

Re: Opinion: We’ll Have Herd Immunity by April

#126

Post by tinus_hn »

sudosysgen wrote: post #113
tinus_hn wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mod…

I presume you have never been in Europe. There barely any borders to close and a lot of people live in one country and work in another. You can’t block that for a year.

In Baarle Nassau in the Netherlands there is a store, and half of it is in the Netherlands and half of it is in Belgium.

By the way, air travel has been ~0 for a year now. Unfortunately it has not in fact stopped the pandemic. Must be the no true lockdown: if it doesn’t work we just say it wasn’t strict enough.

Re: Opinion: We’ll Have Herd Immunity by April

#127

Post by tinus_hn »

sudosysgen wrote: post #107
tinus_hn wrote: post #75

Earlier 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.

This is an empirically testable result. Are regions with the harshest lockdowns doing worse economically? A cursory analysis says no. Places like Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan, Vietnam, China that had very strict lockdowns are doing well economically. Then maybe the worst is intermediate lockdowns? Also no. There are few differences between regions with essentially no lockdowns and those with moderate lockdowns, tho…

Where ‘a cursory analysis’ is a way to describe ‘some cherry picked examples’, yes.

Re: Opinion: We’ll Have Herd Immunity by April

#128

Post by parrellel »

Izkata wrote: post #74
rawfan wrote: post #13

The author, Marty Makary, is a surgon. He does not have any expertise regarding viruses or epidemiology. He's completely ignoring all other reasons why infection might go down, the most important one being effective countermeasures, like wearing masks and social distancing. He's also ignoring that the case rates are stagnating due to the British variant. Germany is in that phase now. Cases of the British variant are…

> He's completely ignoring all other reasons why infection might go down, the most important one being effective countermeasures, like wearing masks and social distancing. If those measures are so effective, why did they take nearly a year for an effect to be seen?

Because the virus is too slow and people are idiots, clearly.

Re: Opinion: We’ll Have Herd Immunity by April

#129

Post by usaar333 »

The assumed prevalence rate (infections/cases) seems really high. Youyang Gu's modeling assumes more like 1 in 3.5 caught implying a 2x lower infection rate and thus a lot further from herd immunity (https://covid19-projections.com/path-to-herd-immunity/)

Gu's modeling also seems much more consistent with numbers I've seen from other papers (hospitalization and death rates).

This reads just bizarrely. The author assumes we'd be near the expected herd immunity threshold (60%) in the face of extensive social distancing? We certainly are at herd immunity in a world with interventions, but those drastically lower the base reproductive number.

Re: Opinion: We’ll Have Herd Immunity by April

#130

Post by chasd00 »

Izkata wrote: post #74
rawfan wrote: post #13

The author, Marty Makary, is a surgon. He does not have any expertise regarding viruses or epidemiology. He's completely ignoring all other reasons why infection might go down, the most important one being effective countermeasures, like wearing masks and social distancing. He's also ignoring that the case rates are stagnating due to the British variant. Germany is in that phase now. Cases of the British variant are…

> He's completely ignoring all other reasons why infection might go down, the most important one being effective countermeasures, like wearing masks and social distancing. If those measures are so effective, why did they take nearly a year for an effect to be seen?

I agree, cases are falling so fast and so dramatically in Texas that it looks like a data error.

I see no way masks and social distancing resulted in the drop off happening now. We're at levels not seen since the mins in Sept/Oct which outruns the holiday wave. I can't make heads or tails of it.

https://apps.texastribune.org/features/2020/texas-coronaviru...

edit: the past weather has certainly had an effect on testing but the drop off predates the storm.

Post reply on HN