Why herd immunity to Covid-19 is reached much earlier than thought

That is, this Lewis is Lewis from all "Lewis and Curry" papers, which are known to be among the favorites of various climate denialists.

Here is a non-inclusive list of Curry's misinformation:

https://www.skepticalscience.com/skeptic_Judith_Curry.htm

It seems that Lewis is "independent" but managing to more formally support these activities, writing papers with Curry.

Which doesn't mean that what he writes now in this article shouldn't be evaluated on its own merit -- it's just that everybody's "prior" for the expectations can be reasonably adjusted: personally, my first reaction was "well, interesting". My second reaction was "now, let's see who's this guy". My third reaction was... I've decided I personally won't spend much time investigating his claims, and I won't hope for much to turn out to be true, based on these (my own) priors. But it's only my own preference.

Also personally, the first time I've read the arguments "Sweden was soo different in measures" I almost believed it. But then I've just checked myself: their universities and schools were also closed at the time when most of the Europe had theirs closed too (the kindergartens weren't -- that's at least something different). Their workers also worked from homes. There was a lot of limiting of the contacts, even when politicians didn't made laws or orders or something for that. I could conclude that what happened in Sweden was definitely not what seemed that those who made the "difference" claims implied.

So reader beware. Check what is claimed as premises, and check if even that is true, before proceeding. Also carefully compare the real numbers. The last time I've checked, Sweden had more deaths per capita from Covid-19 than the U.S. and it's still open how much they have not counted and not reported: still, even comparing these reported, there were something like 4 dead Swedes for every 3 dead U.S. Americans, on average, even if it appears that Swedes do live a bit more healthy (~3 years longer life expectation, before). At least they did 40% more tests per capita than the U.S. up to now.

I am interested in the predictions of herd immunity from mass agent-based simulations, such as the CityCOVID model used by modelers at Argonne national lab (can't really find a good public reference and the slide deck I've seen about it is not public, but it's based on https://github.com/Repast/chiSIM).

The Sweden paper results matches the Bay Area to a T.

(My estimate is that the Bay Area already reached herd immunity in March based on corona arriving in Dec. and flat hospital rates in the local dashboard.)

https://www.sccgov.org/sites/covid19/Pages/dashboard.aspx#ho...