Yah just spitballing reasons why in my area things have fallen off a cliff, and I have a tough time attributing it to a massive shift in personal behavior. We are vaxxing bigly around here, it’s a frozen wasteland so nobody can survive outdoors so that isn’t it. Can’t really come up with any other factors aside from the virus is taking a little snooze. Def not complaining!
Yes but that’s dependent behavior. People can’t change their immune status to “susceptible”. People staying at home can decide to start going out.
There was a thread (maybe linked here) within the last week or so where an epidemiologist said there was most likely some seasonality at play. Other coronaviruses ramp down at a similar time frame. I had assumed seasonality was more related to temperature, but apparently not, or at least not only.
Basically, the concept of herd immunity dictates that growth will remain exponential until 1-1/r0 of the community is immune. There’s actually a term for the people who get infected after herd immunity has been reached called ‘overshoot’.
Until you hit that point, disease will grow exponentially. Running 1.9^x versus 2.0^x is not going to create much of a difference.
ETA: And the amount of people who block the virus needed to cause an effect is exponential as well, although I’m having a tougher time intuitively explaining that.
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I support the new term “Dan and Caffeine Immunity.” As in everyone should feel free to YOLO, we have achieved Dan and Caffeine Immunity!
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I’m in the same situation now
If anything, covid lockdown has shown me that I’d last like a minute in prison.
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does the math say that you hit that limit at full speed like that? it’s a very impressive run-up and top.
It’s not 100% full speed but it’s all exponential so it’s pretty fast.
I wish I could explain the math better, but that’s about the limit of the topic I got. The important bit is that exponential growth remains exponential up until it hits herd immunity. Exponential growth may have a slow burn in the beginning, but it eventually goes up hard.
“Herd dumbunity”
Oh damn. I wanna commit some crimes in Ireland now.
suddenly have less respect for Scottish soccer hooligans.
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I would be shocked if only 30% of Americans have been infected. You can look at the death rate before wide spread testing and compare to the testing numbers in November. Then add up all the people who were infected and didn’t get tested.
This is a bad argument.
There was a steep learning curve for treating covid, especially early on. A lot of people died then that would not have died now.
The worst genre of post on this forum has to be “nitpick single sentences in ways that have nothing to do with the underlying argument.”
I only brought up the idea of “partial herd immunity” to dismiss that factor as the primary cause of the decline in cases. Which presumably you agree with. But instead of accepting that frame you…draw it into question?
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The behavior of the virus last winter is a great point. I remember that being a big point of discussion here in March, about how there was community spread in California in January, and yet 60 days went by with no disastrous growth like in NYC.
One explanation back then was that perhaps there HAS been a massive portion of the population infected and most people simply were asymptomatic or mild. That didn’t have much traction here.
Instead, we settled on a variant potentially in NYC, and maybe population density, and we just sorta moved on. But in light of the virus surging in patterns that are at once consistent and difficult to fully explain, the virus having community spread in CA in January and going undetected for almost two months seems meaningful.
And what I’m saying could be read as an argument against masking or social distance. It’s quite the opposite. Since we don’t seem to understand exactly what is driving these huge surges and retreats of the virus, we should use all the mitigation tools at our disposal that we know for sure actually work. Because more surges are almost certain to come in the near future.
Got my first shot of Astrazenica yesterday. It wasnt a very fun night afterwards. Had the full program of aftereffects: headache, fatigue, shills. But nothing a pain killer couldnt deal with so far.
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Hopefully this is the last wave for LA County. The deaths peaked at 2274 for the first week in February. The high previous to that was about 1600. Prior to Dec 28th 2020 it was about 600.
Second week of Feb down to 1022. Cases are 20% of what they were at the peak, but they’re still kinda high - it was a huge peak.
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I had no side effects from that vaccine apart from a mild whirring in the head that usually presages a cold, and which only lasted a few hours.
It seems to depend a lot on age. The majority of people who called in sick today are the younger ones.