It’s not modified herd immunity, it’s isolation/masks/precautions. As soon as we let up on any of them, it goes back up… And we let up every time. We don’t even flatten it first, we just take a new plateau and then let her rip again.
Even a small town blowing past 80% blows the 20% theory out of the water.
Because the warm weather isn’t a magical cure, being outside seems to be.
Lombary has 100k confirmed cases. Even at 10x confirmed - that’s 1 million. Their population is 10 million. Find me that small town that hit 80%. I’d be interested to see it.
I’m not saying 80% can’t happen. I’m just saying places like Manaus make you wonder if everyone is equally susceptible. Maybe a bunch of people catch it, are asymptomatic, and don’t spread it much - so they’re effectively dead ends.
It seems the bulk of the spread comes from “super spreaders” who shed tons of virus out of their throats. Large sputum droplets from the lungs don’t seem to be a major vector, possibly due to all the cleaning measures. Maybe not everyone can be a super spreader. Or it’s just luck of the draw whether your infection turns into one.
Maybe people started wearing masks in Manaus and that’s all it took to knock down a lot of the super-spreading. But the articles I’ve read didn’t mention that.
The warm weather thing is probably about being outdoors and the virus degrading faster in warmer, moister air. Winter could be a problem.
I think Manaus needs to be seen in context. It’s one sample out of a large sample set.
I don’t understand it and can’t explain it. But I think you should expect lots of outliers.
There are others. Guayaquil died down pretty quick after their initial disaster. Slums in India have super low death rates and no one knows why.
It’s somewhere in one of these threads, it was > 80% and outside the US. I think in Asia. I don’t remember the specifics to search for it.
It seems like there may be cross immunity with other coronaviruses, or some genetic natural immunity. So some places may be less susceptible.
Or we all shed a lot and super spreading events occur when infected people are in big indoor crowds.
My bet is some level of cross immunity with other coronaviruses that ran rampant there.
I’m guessing we can chalk up a large portion of the difference to age and obesity. You generally don’t get old and fat in slums.
Same for the homeless in the US.
There are a lot of things that could be guessed. No one knows anything for sure yet.
Sure. Of course, we can say that about many COVID-related facts.
The disease has only been around for ~9 months. There is only so much that is knowable in such a short period of time.
Probably because they’re slums and nobody is counting. Just another body to toss in the incinerator, no questions asked, no paperwork filed.
Right - so my personal theory FWIW is that things are relatively benign right now (to the point where a lot of people are thinking covid over woo hoo) due to masks + warm weather leading to lower initial viral load, and at risk people and office drones like me still isolating.
My concern is that this false sense of security + back to school + back to office + winter will lead to more and more severe cases - and more household members getting blasted with the big secondary dose from the initial infected household member.
The only thing mitigating that spread will be the people who already got it - assuming they can’t get it again in a serious way. And masks, assuming we don’t abandon those in most cities.
The doctors discussing this low death rate didn’t seem to think India could be not counting deaths in any kind of numbers.
This. We really have to hope two things happen. 1) that flu season is very very mild, hopefully due to some of the precautions we are taking for COVID and 2) that treatment for COVID has gotten a ton better in the last 6 months so that we can treat and remove people from the hospital asap. Otherwise a combo of numbers going up and flu hospitalizations is going to push us back over the capacity threshold come December
What scares me is hospitals seem to have little problem just turning (poor/minority) people away, or sending them home to die. By winter, they’ll have had 9 months to work on protocols to obfuscate their actions.
There aren’t as many elderly in the slums.
Seems like we’re massively underestimating how many people have caught this. Or possibly some segment of the population isn’t susceptible for whatever reason.
Seems likely.
Also seems likely.
I am intentionally waiting til middle of next week to do another data pull due to the standard holiday reporting. At least the 7 days will make sense, the 14 day sums may still be shaky.
Also since we are college age driven the deaths won’t shift up until mid October Is guess. All those schools sending the kids home donchayaknow. Temple just sent theirs back to mom and dad and the olds.
There are probably some local 10x but the US national average Id use 5x.
Concur we are heading for disaster, though it’s sick as a country that 1,000 per day isn’t already considered a disaster.
We are bringing young people together. Mixing them with high efficiency and then sending them out into the wild when schools close on campus living. Lots of small towns are going to get fucked by this as their best protection has been modest influx from population centers. So they don’t take the best precautions. They are also open for grade school so big bro or big sis coming home with it are just going to send it onto the busses, the schools and especially the high school parties.
Then once that mixing occurs, cold weather is going to hit. If it smears into thanksgiving that no one is going to skip then “down goes gramma, down goes gramma” will be heard all over Podunk, USA.