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Opinion: We’ll Have Herd Immunity by April

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

#331

Post by tinus_hn »

spookthesunset wrote: post #309
simonh wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

> Sure, only if you completely disregard the massive costs to these mitigations.

As far as monetary costs go this is really easy to do if you just force businesses to close and send them on their way with a pittance. Is there anything you can’t afford, as long as someone else is picking up the tab?

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

#332

Post by thehappypm »

ryandrake wrote: post #322
thehappypm wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with this 100%. The US flavor of lockdowns are just pointless when there is zero enforcement and even in the most locked down places, indoor gatherings are allowed if they're small.

Plus, in the places in the world where they did do lockdowns, lo and behold, they tended to work. Nothing that was done in the USA could even remotely be described as a lockdown. And none of the so-called orders came close to being effective. Without enforcement, you might as well call your "Stay at home Order" a "Stay at home Suggestion". Currently, in the state of California, 99.8% of the population is in the purpl…

It's definitely the worst-of-both-worlds. You can't go to restaurants, so unemployemnt is sky high. But you can go to a house party with almost zero risk of consequences.

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

#333

Post by gammarator »

“ No, we won't. A deeply flawed oped https://wsj.com/articles/well-have-herd-immunity-by-april-11... —55% of Americans do not have natural immunity —2/3 of the US population has not had covid —Wrong on T-cell protection —Very high Brazil infection rate was not protective —150M will not be vaccinated by March end”

https://twitter.com/EricTopol/status/1362513761383321602

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

#334

Post by laurent92 »

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…

It is very hard for me to put myself back in the mindset of figures being real. In the last 12 months we have been routinely lied, and many political leaders believe misleading the public “for the greater good” is an act of leadership.

Simplest example is the 30 members of the government saying masks are useless as a form of protection in April 2020. Uniform message, no exception, not temporarily, not on a subset, just the blanket message repeated on all newspapers and TC channels, “masks are entirely useless as a form of protection.” (France, by the way). Obviously their goal was to keep stocks for medical personnel, but they chose the lie as a form of getting to their point. Same goes for all the other figures, I know how easy it is to fabricate statistics; Every Monday they tell us figures have jumped since yesterday — obviously because there are fewer tests on weekends. After all this, I have as much confidence in the figures as agricultural production figures in 1970 USSR - For me Covid is like the default checkbox on all death forms, which explain most of the high figures. Newspapers are under state of emergency anyway, so they probably don’t have the choice in what they write. Some succeeded to print articles about how journalists are not allowed to observe the democratic process of decision anymore, but that’s probably all they are allowed to print.

Sorry for the personal anecdote but I’d like to generalize it into “Maybe it isn’t good to tell lies as a routine form of governance.”

As for myself, it’s a pain to not have trust in anything, and I’ll probably spend years cautiously recovering trust in any figure from doctors as genuine and not fabricated for political power.

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

#335

Post by floxy »

ryandrake wrote: post #324
spookthesunset wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The reason the strategy wasn't ever going to work is because the fear level wasn't high enough The average American 35 year old thinks if they catch covid they have a >10% chance of dying. This is off by almost 1000x. If you drove that error down to 0 so people knew exactly what there risks were if they got covid (i.e. for most healthy adults and children, covid is a complete non-event)... I don't think the general…

I don't know anyone who over-estimated their chances of dying, took precautions, and then regretted over-estimating, but I bet that close to 100% of the people who under-estimated their chances of dying regretted it on their death beds. Personally, I am not afraid to admit I am scared of a virus that can be transmitted by asymptomatic people, incubates for two weeks, then can kill you, but hey, I guess that just make…

>a virus that can be transmitted by asymptomatic people

I thought asymptomatic transmission wasn't really a thing. Is there updated data on this?

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-19802-w

Here's the best thing I've found for incubation period:

https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/bmjopen/10/8/e039652.full.pd...

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

#336

Post by QuercusMax »

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…

American here:

"By April" is perhaps intentionally vague, as it's such a long period of time. "This will be done by Monday" tells me not to expect it before end-of-day Monday.

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

#337

Post by phobosanomaly »

EricE wrote: post #121
acdha wrote: post #87

Earlier 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…

"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…

California does have twice the population as Florida and a much, much larger economy.

It could just be that all the elderly Floridians sit at home in gated communities, while Californians are more likely to be going-in to work surrounded by a much larger, more dense population.

Could also be an effect of prevalence of multi-generational housing. Perhaps the elderly Floridians are more concentrated in gated community-type housing, and not living with extended family in a smaller living space.

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

#338

Post by harambae »

ncallaway wrote: post #70
burnthrow wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I love about the news right now is that they've perfected the alchemy of turning every holiday into its own news cycle. Gatherings feared... Experts fear another spike . No proof at all that holiday -> virulence, of course. You should try turning off the news for a bit.

What we do have is proof that increased gatherings lead to increased transmission. We have, I think, a pretty reasonable assumption that holidays lead to increased gatherings. So, a cautious assumption until data shows it's not accurate that "holidays lead to increased transmission" seems to me to be warranted. Have you seen data that shows holidays don't lead to increased transmission?

Anecdotally, it seemed to cause a lot of cynicism when BLM protests, where everyone was packed in pretty good, were barely mentioned in mass media as a potential source of virus transmission.

And yes, I get that it's considered more morally justified by many than watching football in a stadium or playing hockey. But at some point, the virus transmission in a given scenario needs to be dispassionately assessed whether you're robbing a bank or feeding orphans in Uganda.

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

#339

Post by harambae »

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #304
alex_h wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Having no background whatsoever in this area of science, I would imagine that the percentages change over time as some individuals are still going out more or less living their lives and some are holed up extremely risk averse and won't be infected unless their 1 trip to the grocery store per week is compromised.

And it'd be similar for who is readily willing to take the vaccine vs. will refuse to ever do so.

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

#340

Post by guilhas »

jcadam wrote: post #86

So by April we'll have a new crisis in order to keep the lock-downs rolling.

Cases will start to go down in April because Summer, like in 2020. And every year before that for other virus. So they will probably take a moment celebrate the vaccine "success".

But after that, something will definitely come up. Extra crazy variants, covid-ebola-bat-soup mutation, climate panic, aliens, China did it on purpose, Russia, the impending economy crash and burn (because of reddit not government lockdowns)... who knows? Stay tuned for the next episode of The Clown Show.

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