Nice.
I heard on KOGO 600AM talk radio last night that California is going to distribute the vaccine to non white people first. I don’t vet the information I hear from them though so it might not be true.
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My guesstimate that 90 million vaccinated would pull Rt at or below 1 does not factor already infected. To some extent, how bad things are in early-to-mid Spring is an inverse function of how bad things get this winter, as much as it is a function of the vaccine’s success.
My strong feeling is that on May 1 we’re going to be using the exact same mitigation measures we are today, and seeing right around 100,000 cases per day. I’d love to be wrong though.
I wish this were true.
We legitimately had 20k cases/day post-lockdown with average deaths around 500. I am still blown away that we are at 175k/1600 with no end in sight(the deaths are going to rise bigly now also) and our government is just accepting that as fine. I have no doubt that your pessimism will play out because we have decided to fail at this as hard as possible and I don’t really see that changing.
Why so they can test it on the minority population to make sure it’s safe for white people?
I know that is not your position I’m just imagining the conspiracy theories that would start.
The govt knows they can’t make people stay home without paying them and they sure as hell are not going to pay them to stay home.
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Standard disclaimer (if I forget to add this just please assume it): speculation is my own, no I don’t want to quibble about numbers.
We might have 90 million infected by next May. If real cases are 5x confirmed cases, we’re at 43M now. Some states like the Dakotas will probably be at herd immunity well before then. Assuming immunity lasts 1.5 years for say 98% of people or w/e - that makes a huge dent.
And yeah luckily a ton of the anti-vaxxers are also anti-maskers who will have caught it by then.
It would pretty weird for a vaccine to lead someone to become an asymptomatic spreader.
1600 is in the rear view. Today we’re at nearly 2,200 with only 37 states reporting for duty. We’re cruising past 2,500 in the next 2 hours.
BUT MY APPLEBEES
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I have a friend who is an oncologist. Years ago we were drinking late night in NYC and I snuck off to have a cigarette. He busted me, and then bummed one. I couldn’t believe it, but it had to do with appreciating life while you have it, and sometimes doing things that weren’t optimal. I don’t know, we were really drunk. But it seemed very profound at the time.
i can’t find my own post on this issue, i was citing some scientist that claimed that there are no known cases of herd immunity being developed without vaccines.
mathematically, if you treat Rt as a function of the population immunity share, and without changing community behavior, at some point Rt may stabilize around 1 for some percentage, and just stay as a low-grade pandemic, eventually evolving a different receptor, or waiting for individual immunity to wear off. basically, flu of 1918 is still traceable in seasonal outbreaks because there was never a vaccine.
with vaccines, or another behavioral change, that can potentially drastically reduces Rt to a lot less than 1 in every subpopulation will eventually lead to eradication, but I think it is way too early to claim South Dakota is anywhere near or even on the way to herd immunity
At 5x confirmed cases, North Dakota would be at 52% of its population infected. Maybe that multiple is lower. But it’s not 1. Tons of people never get tested. Past studies have found it as high as 10x in some places.
Assuming .5% IFR - ND would be at 25% of its population infected. But that number lags by a month or so. .3% IFR would make the total infected number go up obviously.
If ND keep going the way the way they could easily approach something close to 70-80% infected by May.
There’s also definitely behavior modification that happens - which seems to cause waves. In Manaus there was a horrible first wave, then hospitalizations almost dropped to zero, then it came back. One possible explanation is those are cycles of people getting scared, then getting complacent again.
In big cities you have people like me who have basically removed ourselves from the “herd” for the time being. Guessing in North Dakota and Manaus the work from home crowd is a much smaller % of the populace.
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The term “herd” comes from exactly that. People generally don’t live in herds.
Maybe a closed prison ecosystem?
And practically when vaccination rates are very high.
And remember even if the “herd” is immune it doesn’t mean that individuals can’t get it and there can’t be localized outbreaks based on physical or behavioral isolation of a subgroup. Think anti-vaxxers in their own little religious community.
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problem for SD/ND is that their “herd” is not isolated. if they only mingled between themselves, and those who develop immunity all get it at once (or in one wave), maybe they will eventually get to the low-grade pandemic. but contact with carriers outside the herd means their healthy population is always at risk of exposure, and always at risk of another wave. it would just be a smaller wave, naively at 67% immunity, the wave would be only a third of the original (modulo peak vs timeframe, etc.).
but now i’m just hand-waving. haven’t thought about this stuff since my grad research days and early during covid. this may all be completely wrong /disclaimer
I have a very bad feeling that our capacity can only identify 180-200K cases a day. Case numbers flattened out unexpectedly, and there are lots of anecdotal stories going around of people not being able to get a test.
I couldn’t get one before Thanksgiving, and a friend now who was exposed at Thanksgiving has been trying to book one for four days and been unable to… One part of the country, but one that hasn’t been totally overwhelmed with cases or anything.
My guess is cases never really flattened before Thanksgiving, they kept going up… Then we did a holiday surge on top of it. Now we’re probably still climbing on top of that surge.
When you factor in that IFR will go up due to hospital overrun, I shudder to think of what we’ve just baked in.
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I don’t want to get into an argument and I think you’re a good poster on all other subjects. Your math here is fine, but the assumptions you’re making seem very suspect.
0.3% IFR would be shocking. 5x multiplier is on the high end of a reasonable range.
That said you’re absolutely right on behavior modification, although the bad news is as soon as we get a vaxx out to like 1/3 of the population behavior is going to slip big time.
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.3% would be shockingly low or shockingly high?
.2% of New Jersey is already dead. .3% has no chance of being correct.
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New Jersey nursing homes got destroyed in the early days when they didn’t know how to treat it as well and mitigate viral load with preventative measures. There has to be some significant improvement in IFR since then.
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