Agema said:
So a figure of 1%, ten times higher than 'flu, seems credible.
It does, based on positive cases.
But until proven otherwise, I'm more than willing to hold onto the hope implied by the Diamond Princess. 3700 or so people were living together on a cruise ship for an extended period of time, with a highly contagious virus that has no symptoms right away, and 80% or so never tested positive. These aren't people who were positive but had no symptoms, but people who never tested positive at all. Which means they either managed to dodge a super contagious virus that spreads by breathing from people with no symptoms while surrounded by them in a confined space OR a lot of people were exposed to the virus without ever being testably infected. If you extrapolate that out, assume the overwhelming majority of people on the Diamond Princess were meaningfully exposed to the virus, one might suggest only 1/5 of people who touch this coronavirus will test positive for covid-19. Potentially even less, as the demographics of a cruise ship skew older, and it's young people mostly dodging this. At that point, it's reasonable to suggest the mortality rate is 1/5th of what you find even with comprehensive testing, or even less. That puts the number below 0.2%, which is quite a bit closer.
The models that have been applied to the novel coronavirus have been based on the idea that nobody is immune. Based on that, they figured an R0 of 3ish (though now they're saying closer to 2), which is where you get the early models saying unmitigated growth would leads to 2/3 of the world getting sick. But if 80% of people are effectively buffer to begin with, that's all wrong. Instead, the R0 is off by a factor of 5, so between 10 and 15, and I'm an optimist who likes easy math, so I pick 10. So at 90% immunity, the virus is effectively quashed. But 80% are already immune, so that's half of the remaining people that will be infected. And 1% of those might die. Going from the perspective of America, just because I know those numbers vaguely off the top of my head, 1% of 10% of like 300 million is 300,000 deaths. Which given my assumptions is what you would expect in a scenario with no mitigation whatsoever. Now, with a lot of mitigation done, they're talking about estimates between 100k and 200k deaths. Which is a far, far cry from the millions forecasted early on. I might suggest the experts are also not assuming everyone is susceptible to put out numbers like 100,000. (And with me, once again being the extreme optimist, I'll go even lower. With the rates of new cases and deaths in the US starting to flatten out, suggesting we're beyond the point of exponential growth, one could reasonably suggest just from a dumb normal distribution statistics perspective that we're through about 10% of the deaths, which would put the US at ballpark 30k by the time it's controlled. If I wanted to callously gamble on it right now, I'd probably round up to 50k to be safe and put my money down.)
Herd immunity is red herring: that would need about 60% infected (200 million for the USA). Herd immunity without an overwhelmed health service is not going to happen within the timeframe before a vaccine is likely.
Check it from my perspective instead. You want 90 immunity, but that's only 10% that would ever test positive, and only like 5% of those would require medical treatment, so 0.5% of the population. Which would be more like 15 per 100,000. And like, that fits the real experience of what's going on. New York City had an unmitigated spike, so they're basically hitting that 15 all at once and overwhelming the 7-10 you suggest would be available, but within the limit that outside help can handle the overflow. The rest of the country, to my knowledge, isn't showing signs of exceeding capacity. Mitigating efforts (and likely natural distancing in less urban places) flattened the curve enough everywhere else.
Let's check my logic one more way. I expect 10% of people to become infected with the virus, and I'm also ballparking we're 10% through the bell curve. That means at the end, we'd expect 30 million people infected in the US. We've positively tested 160k. 10x 160k is 1.6 million. Which puts my guesses off one another by about 20x. But with months of not testing, and many reports of people not being tested if they don't require treatment, that 5% hospitalization rate is looking like a pretty convenient number right now.
Lil devils x said:
Excuse me? Exactly what have I stated that was not accurate?
That the virus could reasonably be contained long enough that herd immunity wouldn't be a factor. That is what you've said that isn't accurate.
I am not the one having issues admitting the problem right now, if you think for a second that Trump has been doing what we needed to have done then you really should do some self reflection about now.
I don't think Trump has been doing everything that should have been done. I don't think no mistakes were made. There's definitely irony in you criticizing the administration for sending PPE to China (as though it was a cash grab) during the height of their infection while praising China for using that PPE. But I think Trump's initial ideas of containing the epidemic perpetually were as naive early on as they are if someone suggests that now. Suggesting it would just disappear was stupid. I'd have preferred the mobilization of industry a bit sooner, there's better leadership that could be done than just telling people repeatedly to follow CDC guidance. I don't actually believe Trump is withholding aid from states based on which Governors he likes, it's almost a certainty that the supplies are going out based on where the cases are, and the places with less desperate times feel short-changed by Washington; but Trump shouldn't be butting heads with these governors and making their complaints look justified. He's done plenty wrong.
But he's not "the problem". It's a pandemic. It's natural disaster. The harm can be mitigated by preparation and response, but it's coming in some form no matter who is in charge. If you think Donald Trump is the problem in a global pandemic, you've let politics cloud your vision.
