Muh Muh Muh My Corona (virus)

I've been hammering on that for months.

Most recently when BigPern (among others) was moaning about the US (39% obesity rate) doing so much worse than South Korea (4% obesity rate).

But much more easy to just lump all 200K deaths at the feet of a toddler in the Oval Office instead of blaming it on our grossly unhealthy lifestyle.

(And just six days ago this Sweden story from AP: Sweden spared surge of virus cases but many questions remain )

 

So let's see, if less than 1 in 10 have had it and there are 200,000 dead, then all it takes to achieve herd immunity is a bit over 1.4 million dead.

Carry on.

 

Meanwhile, in Syracuse, Ga Tech and Syracuse are in a delay of uncertain origin just before scheduled kickoff.
The talking heads on the ACC Network broadcast are standing three feet apart and unmasked. Contrast this to the ESPN broadcasters in the Orlando NBA bubble, who are separated by Plexiglas. Same corporate parent/employer. Odd. Bad optics.

 

Internet says the Syracuse situation is because of covid

 

Abundance of caution is the phrase of the year, amirite?

 

Clerical error. Will be starting shortly.

 

ehhhhhh. Sort of.

First and most obviously, that number was for July. We've had two more months of people getting sick since then. Interestingly, they estimated ~9.5% for their study done in July, and Youyang Gu's model for estimating true infected numbers had it at 9.3% on July 15. I've been a big fan of that model, and as of today it estimates it at 15.8% of Americans have been infected.

The big problem is that I don't think anybody but reporters still thinks herd immunity is 70%. The simplistic model used to come up with that number doesn't reflect how viruses spread in the real world, where the people most likely to spread the virus tend to get sick early. The people whose jobs or preferences cause them to come into contact with lots of people will be more heavily represented in early infections, while shut-ins who post on internet message boards all day will be less likely. So as time goes on, the remaining pool of susceptible becomes less and less infectable, making the herd immunity threshold lower.

We still don't have a good idea on the exact number because it requires a lot of assumptions that really need to be tested empirically. And it's going to vary a lot depending on what type of social setup you have, so averaging it out over a diverse and large country is tricky. Some papers have been released showing that it could be as low as 20% under certain sets of assumptions, or as high as 60%. Experts in the field probably wouldn't quibble with you too much if you guessed it was somewhere around 50%.

The 200,000 number is just official deaths, and we're pretty sure we missed a lot of them, especially early in the pandemic. Looking at how many more people have died this year than in a normal year, we're probably closer to 275,000 deaths.

But the vast majority of those came early. The trend has strongly indicated lowering death rates per infection as the pandemic has progressed. You're roughly 1/4th as likely to die today as you were in February or early March. Some of this is because people have changed behavior so that vulnerable people are more isolated and initial inoculum is lower, some of it is because medical treatment has improved considerably.

So how many more deaths would we get if we simultaneously lowered all government restrictions *and* people voluntarily reverted all behavior changes, so we let it run wild? It's really hard to say. Way less than a million. Way more than is acceptable. Back of the napkin, I'd guess like 150k?

 

hi rickstain

 

That's really the only argument needed, though I enjoyed reading your entire post. Welcome back.

 

That wasn't even back of the napkin, it was spitballing from the hip. I (ahem) think your assessment was a bit more substantial.

Good to see you posting.

 

As to "So how many more deaths would we get if we simultaneously lowered all government restrictions *and* people voluntarily reverted all behavior changes?", obviously there are going to be some systemic changes in place, but it looks like DeSantis in Florida is going to do this experiment for us.

 

I’m very curious as to what happens in Florida for sure.

People will always change their behavior when they know there’s a pandemic. COVIDiots get the press coverage, but very few people are behaving the exact same way as they were in January. And Florida has some “advantage” in that they already let a ton of people get sick and die, and the weather is pretty outdoor friendly in most places.

It’s hard to predict because we always seem to end up right around the tipping point where transmission rates are at 1. If you end up at like 0.85, everything gets better and better. If you end up at 1.15, things get slowly worse while people argue about whether it’s really getting worse or not until it’s too late to ignore it.