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No Second Wave
There are a lot of numbers to support the idea that we hit the Herd Immunity Threshold, and COVID is dying for lack of new hosts to infect.
Personally, being an OFG with some health challenges, I’ll keep wearing a mask in public, and giving in to my inner hermit. But for the rest of the world this looks like good news.
Published in General
On the other hand, it is summer, when most flues essentially disappear.
We OFGs may be cautiously optimistic, but, as you suggest, place the emphasis on “cautiously.”
I pray this is true.
Cautiously optimistic. The steep increase in cases should naturally result in some slight uptick in deaths. We’re a couple weeks out now from cases rising, and until yesterday the number of deaths has continued to fall. Yesterday we had the most recorded deaths since June 20th . . . so . . . I’m not sure if that’s an outlier or not.
Oh Brother.
Meanwhile in the real world, we hit a record 60k cases in one day in the US and 200K worldwide.
Florida, Texas and Arizona are reporting record cases, deaths and hospitalization.
We are well into summer and it sure doesn’t look like it’s “just vanishing” here or in lots of other places around the world like oh, Brazil, not exactly known for it’s chilly weather.
Are they? Death count (except for yesterday) still shows a decline.
All I hear in the media is some phrase involving the word “record.” No numbers.
Here is a link to a post by a NC physician discussing herd immunity.
Don’t understand…how do you get ‘innate immunity’ without antibody immunity?
Last week I had a post estimating that the US as whole was 50% of the way to herd immunity. New York, Michigan are basically there and the southern are now rapidly catching up. Seasonal flu infects about 10% of the country (with a vaccine) and Spanish Flu infected about 30% of the population. If we have herd immunity at less than 20% for an engineered novel virus, that is a nice surprise. There is no reason not to open K-12 schools.
It’s a different immunity mechanism. It works differently and at the moment, because it doesn’t produce antibodies, it’s almost impossible to read. We know about it and we can see evidence of it, but we can’t “read” it the way we read a person’s DNA.
I hope this virus pandemic will spur the research into enabling us to “read” the innate immune system for an individual.
I’m skeptical of many things. I’ll say I’m more believing that FL is now just having it’s (probable) first real wave. We flattened our curve and never peaked. That was the goal of the stated policy! At the same token, because we never had a NY style blow up, we managed to spread out our cases, and shift the median to the population most likely to either be asymptomatic or experience what is maybe a bad cold. That meaningful, and positively, impacts our ability to handle this going forward in terms of healthcare resources and social impacts.
At the same time, we still have a lot of work to do. We don’t know what happens in the fall, especially if schools (and thus interstate travel) open up and people think about coming down here for vacation. My dreaded situation is to be muddling through cases debating “which wave” and percent positives and “well its okay if young people get it” and then suddenly transition into a situation where we do actually start to peak in the fall. It is neat to talk about viruses conforming to waves and maybe it is helpful to some people; but I don’t think the virus really cares about that any more than someone protesting in the street.
Isn’t innate immunity a function of an individual’s immune capability to any given foreign pathogen without antibodies?
It is not innate immunity, it is T-Cell immunity that learns more generically than anti-bodies. The thinking is that T-Cells, which are the first defense in people under 60, are ready for Wuhan Flu, because they have been trained by common colds to attack corona viruses. From here:
This may explain why those SE Asian countries are having almost no cases.
Sigh.
It’s moving up again. Remember. Theres almost a month long lag in exposure, infection, illness, hospitalization, death, reporting. With hospitals and ICU’s filling up deaths will follow.
We do have a better idea how to treat than we did in March, so maybe they won’t climb as much. But if lots of people are getting sick deaths will probably follow.
Okay, but when I look at the charts for the U.S. it’s been moving down. Until yesterday, but then looking back over the last several weeks, Tuesdays are generally the week’s peak death count. So . . . where do you get your data? I’m looking at the Worldometers site, and the 7-day average is on a downward trend. Was yesterday a one-day outlier?
http://ricochet.com/777134/second-wave-not-even-close/
I just read this article and posted all the relevant graphs.
vehemently agree!
@kozak How significant are positivity rates? Do they certainly tell us something or does a high positivity rate only increase the likelihood of a problem?
Did Cuomo send sick people to old age homes again?
Every metric that we would rationally use to assess this situation has been corrupted. Case rate has been corrupted by including all serologic (antibody) tests with PCR active viral assays, meaning that every positive test is considered a new case even though the patient may have had the infections months before. Death rate is corrupted by the intentional effort to classify dying with Covid-19 as the same as dying from Covid-19. Hospitalization rates are corrupted by the same mechanism. One third of patients admitted to hospitals in Miami because of automobile accidents or similar trauma were positive for Covid testing and became Covid-19 hospitalizations. Despite all of these disingenuous efforts it is will soon become obvious to everyone that the pandemic is almost over.
Given the mixing of test types and very high false results, they don’t tell us much at all.
The positivity rate is a way to help differentiate if the increased number of cases is due to increased testing or not.
It the positivity rate is falling or stable the increase is likely to increased testing.
If the percent positives is increasing that suggests that the increase is due to more then increased testing.
The PCR test has a pretty low false positive rate. So if there’s a trend, it’s likely real.
Not likely we are near herd immunity most serious experts estimate we need, at a minimum, >40% rate-we are not near that. If it is true that a mutated form of coronavirus is spreading in the SW (that is up to 8-10x more contagious but same lethality) than the “herd immunity rate” will have to be higher.
for the optimistic scenario-
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/06/200623111329.htm
Huh?
Stay tuned.
Yep. But I’m not going to automatically assume the worst, particularly when it comes from those who have been boosting the worst possible outcomes since the start. The graph I posted was the U.S. entire, where the death rate has been declining. Yes, there are still hot-spots. I tend to think that some parts of the country hit hard and early have probably achieved their herd immunity. Other parts not so much. We might have merely prolonged the pain with this shut-down (while destroying the economy as well.) We’ll get through this, but it’s not going to be the millions dead that some people here were claiming we’d see.
As an example, AZ began substantially increasing its testing in late April. By mid-May cases had increased 2X but testing had gone up 4X and positives went from 11% to 5%, so although absolute number of cases increased I thought we were doing okay. Since Memorial Day testing has gone up another 2.5X but cases have gone up 9X and the positive rate for the last full week was 22%. Not good. And even though hospitalization and mortality rates have declined the sheer number of positive cases is generating many more hospitalizations and deaths than previously. You can argue that AZ only went into its first wave since Memorial Day.
What bothers me about the linked article is throughout this people across the political spectrum have wanted to take victory laps at specific points in time when things seemed to be fitting into their ideological priors. Though we all (and I include myself) like to impose our speculative narratives on the data we are still in the midst of this and the humbling truth is there is a lot we still don’t know and we simply don’t know what direction things are going to go in.
I was watching a podcast. Just released today. Interviewing a Swedish Doctor who did the T-cell analysis in Sweden. Based on her studies she showed like 10% of the Stockholm population has antibodies. But it looks up to 30% actually have the T cells. being peer-reviewed right now. So it’s not technically been published yet.