[1] https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-03-27/coronavi...
Some states like CA were prepared
CA has a stockpile that was allowed to deteoriate due to budget cuts. So the initial impression was that we weren't prepared, but then we reassessed the situation and gave away at least 500 ventilators to other states as we felt more confident.
Luckily, Bay Area and LA residents travel to China a lot, so we already had substantial herd immunity by February 1.
You can see that in the Santa Clara dashboard, which never showed an emergency situation:
https://www.sccgov.org/sites/covid19/Pages/dashboard.aspx#ho...
Not the "sky is falling" narrative that HN and the press keep trumpeting, is it?
Ummn, what? This sounds like an entirely made up factoid, and certainly isn't supported by the dashboard. The estimates of how many people in a population have to have had COVID-19 are very high. Even if you buy the Stanford study, which is itself controversial, the estimated numbers for how many have been exposed to the virus are still an order of magnitude below what you'd need for herd immunity.
The “criticism” on those studies are more hypothetical and not universal. It’s like “this study could be wrong because X”, and “that study could be wrong because Y”, but there are more than enough now to draw statistical conclusions.
The difference between 20% (NYC antibody positives) and herd immunity estimates (75%) is not an order of magnitude.
No, we don’t have herd immunity, but enough that the rate of infection is slowing.
And actually, at this rate we’ll get to herd immunity before a vaccine is found. Maybe the lockdown breakers are ironically the ones that (1) saves the economy (2) ends the corona pandemic.
24,708 people have died in NY so far, but we'd need 82775 to die to get herd immunity. That's about 1% of NYC's population. Of course, NYC's population is a lot less since so many people left the city as this was getting started, and it also takes a while for many hospitalized people to lose their fight with this disease, so the 24,708 is an undercount. It also undercounts excess mortality.
Still, if we neglect all of that, you're looking at 3 million Americans dead in order for your strategy to work.
After we sacrifice the 3 million, we don't even know what the immunity will look like. Our experiences with other coronaviruses are not all that promising. People may be reinfected within months.
The NYC study is interesting; of course, it's a random sample of people at grocery stores and community centers i.e. "those who are out and about in a pandemic", not a truly random sample. But it's intriguing nonetheless.
Still, I'm not sure what the course of action that it supposedly suggests is: make everywhere in the USA 3x as infected as NYC at its peak? That's 40K more dead there and I doubt that the extrapolation to the rest of the country would be fun.
The rate of infection is slowing because of shelter-in-place orders. Suggesting we're to the point of developing herd immunity is completely baseless and improbable.
You don’t think that has something to do with the fact we drove our economy off a cliff by asking (or forcing) people to stay home?