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Opinion: We’ll Have Herd Immunity by April

wsj.com

301–310 of 381 posts

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

#301

We CAN be at normalcy in the US by April if we do the following: -approve Astrazeneca -First Doses First If we vaccinate those over 50 who want to be vaccinated, the death rate will plummet about 90%. Then, COVID is similar to flu level of societal death and I don't see any reason most people can't be completely normal. This ignores anti vaxers whose deaths are sad but should probably be considered closer to "neglige…

The focus on deaths ignores permanent effects that some survivors have. Lung damage, loss of taste/smell, etc.

I don't know the data on how many people have long-lasting effects, but I do know some people have had them.

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

#302

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…

" Also it is 100% clear that tons of people can’t wait to be allowed to visit each other. Claiming ‘people aren’t going to congregate’ is simply a lie. In the Netherlands we had one test event with 1500 tickets and over 100000 people applied for a ticket. They can’t wait to congregate. " I'm not up to date on the situation in the Netherlands. Is it that you can do anything you want if you have a negative test? Becaus…

No, they are going to run an event with 1500 people as a test, a small dance festival. They also had a football match with two low ranked teams playing for a live crowd. The papers proudly proclaimed that that football match had trouble selling its tickets, as proof of the ‘nobody wants to congregate’ theory. It’s unsurprising though, considering this game wouldn’t quite sell out in a normal situation. To those people it did come as quite a surprise that a dance festival that offered 1500 tickets got over 100000 reservations.

People can’t wait to get together and while most people do follow the measures many would stop the second it was no longer required. But some people have locked themselves in their home for a year now and think everyone is like that. That’s not quite true.

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

#303
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lockdowns were never going to work, and any strategy that relied on them was doomed to fail. A strategy that involves convincing every country, and every little province, to destroy their local economies, all at the same time. I can’t believe it didn’t work! Maybe if we just keep trying.

Lockdowns have been extremely successful in a great many countries. Some examples include: * China bringing their initial outbreak down to near-zero * Italy arresting their early surge that overwhelmed health systems * New Zealand bringing their infection rate low enough to essentially return to normal life (apart from international travel) * The UK stopping a dramatic winter uptick involving the B 1.7.1 variant from…

So two islands, an authoritarian communist government, and Italy have seen success with lockdowns?

Good for Italy!

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

#304
post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks like we're currently hovering around 21.39% and were at 15.26% on 2021-01-31. 6% in ~22 days At what level are we considered herd immune? When 50.1% of the population is immune/recovered?

It depends on the r value of the virus. A more transmissible virus requires a higher level of population immunity. Most common estimate I've seen for covid is 70-80%

Is it foolish to extrapolate that:

* we are at 20%

* we need to reach 80%

* we have 60% to go

* we got 6% in 22 days

* 60% / 6% in 22 days = 220 days until the country can reopen?

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

#305
post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"He wants you to believe that green is the best color of M & M, but his business went bankrupt," is an ad hominem argument. "He trains parakeets, so I don't find him a credible source of dog behavior" is not.

"He trains parakeets, so you should not believe his position that the dog salivates because the bell rings" is.

The trouble with your example is that it conflates common knowledge and expert opinion.

No one would question a parakeet trainer now if he claimed dogs respond to Pavlovian conditioning, because it is common knowledge that dogs respond to this type of conditioning.

However, if Pavlov had been a parakeet trainer and simply asserted dogs respond to Pavlovian conditioning rather than discovering and researching it, it would not have been an ad hominem argument to state he doesn't know what he's talking about... because he didn't until he studied and researched it.

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

#306
post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I give up. First it's hoax, then it's just a bad flu, then it's going to disappear like magic, then a second wave is impossible, then it's that vaccines aren't necessary and don't work. Meanwhile, people die in their thousands per day and the death toll piles up and hospitals get over-run with dying patients. As for lockdowns, we know from analysis of the Spanish Flu epidemic that cities with successful lockdowns suf…

> Spanish Flu epidemic Trying to compare now to >100 years ago is full of all kinds of bad assumptions. Life in 1918 hardly resembles life in 2020 in any discernible way. > China had the mother of all lockdowns and is back to robust economic growth Believing this means you have to trust information disseminated by the Chinese Communist Party, which would be a foolish thing to do. They are 100% committed to saving fac…

It’s how it looked to the virus that really matters. Large urban populations, massive global movements of people, no vaccine. I think from an epidemiological point of view it really wasn’t all that different. Was it really all that different in terms of day to day economic contact either? Urban sprawl, shopping centres, industry, trains, trucks, telecommunications, global freight. Businesses losing workers and customers had basically the same problems.

Sure the Chinese government can’t be trusted, but there are plenty of foreigners in China these days, including journalists. My wife is Chinese and we’re in almost daily contact with family over there. When it comes to general movements of the population and public or industrial policy these things come out eventually.

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

#307
post #34

This "pandemic" has given me permanent damage to hips, back and knees, without once having COVID, or ever meeting someone who has had COVID, or meeting someone who knows someone who has had COVID. I only know one person that knows a person who had COVID, and that person is on the other side of the planet. I would much rather have had COVID. COVID lasts some weeks, maybe months with long COVID, I have damage for the r…

> This "pandemic" has given me permanent damage to hips, back and knees, It sounds far more likely that some poor decisions in how you managed your lifestyle and/or ergonomics during the pandemic led to those conditions. Nobody forced you to work from your couch/bed/floor or whatever it was that caused your unfortunate condition. Ikea and Office Depot remained open nearly everywhere...

That sounds like elitism to me. Who are you to know whether the parent poster could afford extra furniture or if they even had space in their home for it?

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

#308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again this idiotic discourse that doesn't understand that letting a pandemic spread unchecked across the world has huge risks even beyond the obvious death toll. Covid19, even with the current measures, has killed more people than TB worldwide in 2020. Those deaths are often in addition to those killed by TB, overdose, and most other diseases you care to pick. It has let countless other people with chronic symptoms o…

>It has let countless other people with chronic symptoms of varying severity, possibly for the rest of their lives. This is complete FUD with as-of-yet no scientific support. The lifetime effects of poverty and depression, in contrast, are quite well-studied and there's strong evidence that even a single year of unemployment can have a significant negative impact on lifetime health outcomes. >Covid19, even with the c…

> This is complete FUD with as-of-yet no scientific support. The lifetime effects of poverty and depression, in contrast, are quite well-studied and there's strong evidence that even a single year of unemployment can have a significant negative impact on lifetime health outcomes.

So because they haven't been studied, we should assume there are none? We know for sure that SARS has left most survivors with chronically reduced lung function, so there are a priori reasons to believe it is a risk for Covid19 as well.

Also, unemployment and poverty are not natural consequences of disease preparedness, they are consequences of specific policy decisions and of valuing the rights of rich people more than the vast majority of the population.

> The vast-majority of these people were on death's door already, whereas the people taken by overdoses and depression are in the prime of their lives.

No, they weren't. The majority had chronic illnesses that they would have expected to live more than 10 years with, but their lives were cut short by Covid19. Also, the majority of the increase in death rates in most places in the world has been due to Covid19.

Not to mention, the countries that took the disease the most seriously and had the most effective lockdowns ALSO had the shortest lockdowns and the most rapid economic recovery. Look at Vietnam for an excellent example. Short, localized, but quite extreme lock downs have meant that most of the country has been in business as usual mode for most of 2020, with less than 100 total deaths (total, in a country with half the population of the US living in an area the size of one state, neighboring China!), despite being the first country outside China to have community spread.

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

#309
post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So in that case, you're willing to say that under current conditions in the US, mask wearing and restrictions on things like dining are pointless, right? If "lockdown" can only be expected to produce results in its strongest form and we can't do that, that seems like the logical conclusion.

Any improvement over nothing is worth having. Just because the large number of lockdown deniers make the kinds of lockdowns seen elsewhere in the developed world impossible, doesn’t mean the level of compliance that is possible isn’t worthwhile. The experience from the Spanish Flu, which seems to have similar overall lethality, is instructive. Many developed countries managed to lock down to some extent and keep the…

> Any improvement over nothing is worth having.

Sure, only if you completely disregard the massive costs to these mitigations. The costs in terms of lost educations, lost careers, mental health, isolation, etc, etc, etc.... those all have to be factored into the equation. Sadly we are 11 months into this and people are still pretending like there are no costs.

To make lockdowns worthwhile, you'd have to demonstrate orders of magnitude fewer hospitalizations and deaths. Haggling over which country or state did better than the other by 5% or 8% simply means that even if the lockdowns worked, their benefits are almost certainly not worth the costs.

The impacts of lockdowns (or any NPI) should be clear as day to the common person looking at the data. Thus far, all I see are people nit-picking tiny differences between regions. Which to me is a very strong indicator that they were not worth the cost at all.

In short, your line of thinking is a perfect demonstration of covid myopia. Nothing else but covid has mattered for 11 months. I strongly assert that covid myopia is a disease far worse than the virus. Civilizations in the future will remember this period for our myopic focus on one specific risk to the exclusion of everything else--the virus itself will be but a small footnote in history.

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

#310
post #298
post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure the New York Times is a good example here. It's definitely not just their opinion page that is partisan these days, and whilst this does seem to have gotten worse I'm not sure there was exactly a golden era - they seem to have always been particularly keen on pushing narratives.

Yeah, I don't disagree. My question was targeted more at folks that specifically find the WSJ Op-Ed to be objectionable; in my experience those same people tend to consider the NYT's Op-Ed to be less objectionable (caveat: I'm operating on an N of like 4). The most internally consistent position, IMO, is that Op-Eds are all partisan and should all be abolished, in every paper. They once served a useful purpose, but a…

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