Opinion: We’ll Have Herd Immunity by April
wsj.com
wsj.com
What, the linked study proves the opposite. A massive amount of death in Manaus in 2021, despite 'herd immunity' measured in October 2020. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
> Some medical experts privately agreed with my prediction that there may be very little Covid-19 by April but suggested that I not to talk publicly about herd immunity because people might become complacent and fail to take precautions or might decline the vaccine. But scientists shouldn’t try to manipulate the public by hiding the truth.
Does he hear himself? You can't really liken wild guesses that lead to complacency/death as hiding the truth. It sounds like this guy should really stick to surgery.
That is not a study. It is an editorial. It "proves" nothing, and instead advances a few alternative theories that might explain the discrepancy. However, it is not a complex situation. The following quote from the editorial is consistent with my personal belief after reading the original paper [1] that made the herd immunity claim:
"The 76% estimate of past infection might have been biased upwards due to adjustments to the observed 52·5% (95% CI 47·6–57·5) seroprevalence in June, 2020, to account for antibody waning."
This is true, but it understates the extent of the authors "adjustments". If you look at the original paper (Figure 2; linked below), they adjusted the raw data upward by a factor of about 3x. It is an...aggressive...modification to the raw data.
The parsimonious explanation for what is being observed in Manaus is that the Science paper claiming herd immunity was wrong. The authors of this Lancet editorial go to great lengths to advance alternative explanations involving "variants", but these are all unfounded, convoluted alternatives. The simplest explanation is that the original paper was wrong.
"furthermore, comparisons of blood donors with census data showed no major difference in a range of demographic variables, and the mandatory exclusion of donors with symptoms of COVID-19 is expected to underestimate the true population exposure to the virus."
Here, the Lancet writers are trying to argue that the sample wasn't that biased, and therefore the Science paper was right, and therefore the current infections are due to "variants".
It's a very weird and convoluted argument. Comparison to demographic variables is irrelevant, and the second sentence doesn't address the actual concern with the Science paper (i.e. testing in Brazil was rare at the time of the study, so people with Covid sought out the study). Regardless, I think it's a red herring. It doesn't matter if the sample was biased or not -- you can look at the data as collected, and see that the upward adjustments were so aggressive that the conclusion of the Science paper is likely to be wrong.
Which then makes the opinion desk at the WSJ a real oddball. It's consistently right-leaning, sometimes to the point of absurdity. I would think that a more varied field of opinion would resonate better with their target reader... but what do I know.
I'm hoping they Do Something about it. Just make it a separate $10/month add-on and see what the uptake is.
While the paper, on the same day itself, reported the opposite [2].
Links: 1) https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-deep-green-freeze-11613411002... 2) https://www.wsj.com/articles/texas-freeze-power-grid-failure...
The most internally consistent position, IMO, is that Op-Eds are all partisan and should all be abolished, in every paper. They once served a useful purpose, but are arguably no longer necessary in a world where everyone can post an opinionated blog post on Medium/Substack/etc and broadcast it out to the world via Twitter/Mastodon/etc more or less for free.
This article we're commenting on is just an interesting (if potentially dubious) blog post by a surgeon, and nothing more than that.
BBC with more extensive coverage (more than just the breaking news) would be my ideal model.
Global perspective but still does deep dives into American issues; not owned by Murdoch; opinion desk not insane; soothing peach background color in both paper and online editions.
relevant example from this week is Australia, where editor in chief for the Murdoch conglomerate has no answer to why they banish all articles about climate change science to the Opinions sections.
https://twitter.com/ChaplainheArt/status/1363168269599973382
All opinion sections of every major news outlet is extremely politicized. In almost all cases, the non-opinion sections are edging towards being extremely politicized as well.
It’s not a “wild guess.” There is data to support it. So what you’re really saying is that scientists should avoid discussing possible interpretations of the data for fear of what conclusions the public might draw. That’s not how science works and it isn’t a good way to build public trust in the process.
That's far higher than what the CDC measures. They have actual data on whether people show antibodies.[1] Their main data source is from random blood samples processed by commercial labs where the samples were taken for some other purpose. The trouble is, the blood lab data runs way behind; the latest data is about 60 days old. But that's what to watch. It's annoying that so little current data is available on this. Anyway, as of late December, those numbers are from 3% (Hawaii) to 23% (North Dakota).
Blood samples are also taken from blood donations. If you donate blood, you get an COVID-19 antibody test done on it, and the Red Cross will tell you the results. (Yes, there's an app for that.) Those provide a crosscheck. People who have blood drawn for medical purposes tend to be sicker than average, and blood donors tend to be less sick than average. So one would expect the value for a whole population to be somewhere above the blood donor rate and below the medical sample rate.
Kansas is seeing 22% of blood donors showing antibodies, as of mid-January. Note that this includes people who have been vaccinated, which, for Kansas, is about 8%. That compares to 12% showing antibodies in lab samples as of mid-December, which was pre-vaccine. I haven't been able to find data from other states. Anyone finding that?
There are a number of approved blood-based antibody tests, and they have sensitivity levels from 89% to 99%. So test error isn't a big contributor to error.
So, while the measured values are moving up, nothing as high as 55% is showing up in the actual data yet. More current data would be a big help. Perhaps the data collection and publication will be improved under the new administration. Anyway, looking at the actuals is more useful than trying to project this from a measurement of something else.
[1] https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/?CDC_AA_refVal=http...
[2] https://www.ctnewsonline.com/news/article_a97ef828-6122-11eb...
> Covid-19 deaths in the U.S. would also suggest much broader immunity than recognized. About 1 in 600 Americans has died of Covid-19, which translates to a population fatality rate of about 0.15%. The Covid-19 infection fatality rate is about 0.23%. These numbers indicate that roughly two-thirds of the U.S. population has had the infection.
I usually see numbers like 0.5-0.6% bandied around for the US, which changes the deaths-IFR estimate to 1/4-1/3 of the country having been infected, rather than 2/3.
The 0.23 IFR would only be the current IFR. In the real world, the vast majority of the 0.15 % of the population died when the IFR was significantly higher, either due to the initial lack of understanding about the virus such as during the beginning of the pandemic, or due to the fact that even after we had a better understanding the majority of deaths across the country happened under situations where the IFR was higher due to hospitals being overloaded.
Next week, tune in for a sculptor's hot take on the Mars lander.
These sadly arent the exclusive purvey of the journal. plenty of other dog-trainers and nightly consumer-news shows often feature what amounts to a thinly-veiled quarantine tantrum masquerading as insightful critique.
At this point the divisions have been potentially driven to a point where each individual is atomized. Of course that it is the extreme case, but you needn't look far if you are looking to personify the target of the fear campaign.
>it's back to the drawing board for the media firms and their owners.
Enter social media. All of your "friends" believe in precepts x, y and z. It is popular. Don't be skeptical. That's fringe. Do you need a fact check headline?
It isn't difficult to imagine how the WMD story would be sold today.
Another thing about "fear sells"... some fears are more comfortable than others. That's why it has taken so much work to get a tiny minority of Americans worked up about global warming, but they've easily stoked a series of stupid wars. It's comfortable to fear brown people, but it is less comfortable to fear things that seem fundamental to our own lives like the current form of our economy.
Even experts in adjacent or overlapping fields are suspect. I'm a flight instructor. I teach in airplanes. Would you believe what I have to say about helicopters? You shouldn't. I don't know jack about them.
If you picked up a member of an Amazonian tribe who had never seen a car before, are you going to worry about the tire if he claims the tire pressure is low? Well, sure, it’s easy enough to check. But what if it was $500 to check? No. I don’t think you would.
Here's what I wouldn't do: prejudicially dismiss the tribesman's opinion, citing his lack of authority on the topic.
Even if we accept the premises of an appeal to authority, it would follow that one would have to also be an authority on the topic before he could determine the authoritativeness of another speaker. How can you evaluate the authority of a speaker, if you yourself are not an 'authority' on the topic?
Even if you are an authority, does this status render you infallible?
No, I'm afraid the entire premise is ridiculous.
Even if you wouldn't in this particular case, you can't possibly function in the world if you eschew questions of trust completely. You'd basically have to prove everything yourself.
> Even if we accept the premises of an appeal to authority...
An appeal to authority is claiming something is true because an authority said it. The inverse of that would be that something is untrue because no authority said it. No one is claiming that to be the case and even if they were, that wouldn't make it an appeal to authority. In any case, this is a question of credibility (i.e., trust).
> ...it would follow that one would have to also be an authority on the topic before he could determine the authoritativeness of another speaker.
This doesn't follow at all. I am not an expert on tires, but I can understand that someone who has never even seen a tire is also not an expert on tires.
> Even if you are an authority, does this status render you infallible?
No. Of course not. But it does make you a more credible source of information in your field of expertise.
The former is absolute, the latter allows for other factors of consideration.
In actual human discussion, pointing out that someone is making claims about something they don't know anything about is the very basis of common sense. Trying to make this out to be a logical fallacy only shows how useless that label is.
How can you prove that they don't know what they are talking about without disputing the points they have made?
You must attack the argument, not the person.
Pointing out that a guy who is not an expert in a field is making claims that go against the actual experts in that field is a perfectly reasonable argument, and ignoring it is intentionally blinding yourself.
"Ad hominem (Latin for 'to the person'), short for argumentum ad hominem, refers to several types of arguments, some but not all of which are fallacious." [Emphasis added]
In particular, pointing out that someone is speaking outside of their area of expertise is a logically valid ad hominem argument.
"He trains parakeets, so I don't find him a credible source of dog behavior" is not.
No one would question a parakeet trainer now if he claimed dogs respond to Pavlovian conditioning, because it is common knowledge that dogs respond to this type of conditioning.
However, if Pavlov had been a parakeet trainer and simply asserted dogs respond to Pavlovian conditioning rather than discovering and researching it, it would not have been an ad hominem argument to state he doesn't know what he's talking about... because he didn't until he studied and researched it.
Assertion: "That apple will fall on your head"
Appeal to authority: "You're not a physicist! Show me your PHD."
When I am a non-expert in a complicated subject, I want the advice of experts. When I go to my general practitioner, I want to know they have a certificate that says they went to medical school. When I need open-heart surgery, I want to know the doctor is a cardiothoracic surgeon.
When I read a doctor's take on coronavirus in the WSJ, it would be a plus if they were an expert in infectious disease or epidemiology. It's kind of sad that the nation's 2nd highest circulation paper can't find someone with more expertise in this area.
Amplifying non-expert advice is dangerous, just like having an orthodontist try to do heart surgery is dangerous. C.f. Scott Atlas, of course.
If the purpose of such a note is to attack the validity of the author's position, this is what ad hominem means.
The appearance of this article on HN is effectively an argument from authority -- the newspaper's, not the author's. Without that, we wouldn't even be talking about it. Undercutting their arguments is time consuming, but pointing out that they don't have the background to be making their claims -- and that they're appearing on an editorial page famous for putting politics over facts -- is sufficient for many people to say, "Let's stop considering this and go talk about something else."
Those who want to continue the argument may, of course. But meeting an argument from authority with the exact opposite argument (truthful, but ad hominem) is a convenient shortcut for those who don't want to get sucked into that.
Because these lockdowns affect all of those things. Shouldn't "experts" in those fields have a voice in all this too?
Why is the only expert that is allowed to have an opinion worthy of being listened to the esteemed epidemiologist "expert"? Public health is more than the eradication of a specific form of disease, you know. Perhaps getting input from other experts might promote a more balanced take on how to deal with this pandemic.
And hell... plenty of the "expert" doomsday figures aren't epidemiologists at all and people have no problem reposting their announcements. For example if Andy Slavitt of Eric Feigl-Ding wrote an opinion piece on how we should have a ultra-hard lockdown for 6 months, nobody would call into question their expertise at all despite neither of them knowing anything about epidemiology or infectious disease.
By the way, I find it curios that absolutely none of the "experts" we are told to exclusively listen to have lost a single paycheck the entire 11 months this has been going on. Funny, that. Wonder what they would recommend if they stopped getting paid and had to spend two months on hold with unemployment trying to get a human to talk to.
Otherwise respectable news outlets really need to get rid of their dead weight opinion sections, which only serve to damage the credibility of the news divisions. These pundits are a dime a dozen and their unfounded speculation (or at times outright misinformation) is no better than the typical junk floating around medium and substack.
But the focus on herd immunity, if conflated with immunity after infection, is misleading:
Look at what's happening in Manaus:
https://www.bmj.com/content/372/bmj.n394
The news there are definitely sobering :(
Unfortunately, the multiplication of strains of covid19 was inevitable, due to the decision of multiple countries to let the disease spread almost unchecked through its population :/
I don't think a strategy that needs every country on earth to cooperate this tightly ever had a chance to work.
Most countries aren't the first world, most countries don't have the resources to test and quarantine properly, most countries can't afford lockdowns.
On top of that a lot of countries have much worse disease to deal with, Malaria for example, for them this is just one of many, and not such a terrible one.
There will be mutations, this will come back a few times, maybe it becomes milder on its own, but thinking you can keep it from mutating is Quixotic.
A month after we knew we were in deep trouble it was still perfectly normal to decide hey this is boring I'll go on vacation to somewhere with nowhere near the capacity needed to handle COVID-19. Oh, I have a little cough, never mind if I feel sick I'll just fly home after I'm done infecting these people.
Remember this is SARS-CoV-2. Where's the mutations and endless new strains of SARS-CoV-1? There aren't any, it was eliminated in humans.
So yes it is now sadly likely we're stuck with this, but we ought to be clear it's our fault in countries that didn't do even one tenth of what they should to prevent it.
I think this is only because it was contained in China before it reached the world. They had an excellent pandemic response and quashed it before it reached other countries.
This time around it had spread around the world before we even heard about it. It was completely predictable containment efforts would be futile.
Is this true? According to the CDC, there were SARS cases reported in Europe and the Americas prior to containment in China. Why was it different this time around?
All the data I've seen on SARs and the mechanisms deployed to control it indicate infectivity at or only very, very shortly before clear symptoms or they would not have been able to control it.
COVID is quite clearly infectious before visible symptoms of any kind, and even when visible many times symptoms are pretty mild - where SARs was not - and this matches it's observed spread and difficulty in controlling it.
It doesn’t need anything that drastic: imagine an alternate history where the Taiwanese warnings in December 2019 had been taken seriously and international travel was locked down with a mandatory three week quarantine (adjusted by the later availability of tests) on arrival. That would require no cooperation from any other government, and it would have kept spread down below the level where contact tracing and other measures could be effective. Making it a delay avoided the obvious failures like an outright ban packing as many people as possible into crowded transportation and customs facilities, and means that critically important travel could still happen.
The problem was that businesses like the travel industry are influential and delayed until it was too well established in most countries and once it had successfully been turned into a political shibboleth, the chances of lighter approaches working plummeted.
The disease originated in Wuhan, mainland China, not Taiwan.
The emergency was communicated in China (as well as Taiwan):
http://py.cnhubei.com/py_news/2019/1231/3290.shtml
Sure, listening to any official source would've been better than what happened... But shutting down travel to/from the whole of China (since otherwise you'd have to trust every passenger to declare if they had been in Wuhan) while there were less then 30/40 cases of pneumonia, and not a single death would've been a really difficult measure to sell
Yes, I’m aware - try more carefully reading my comment and note that I never said otherwise. What I was referring to was Taiwan being faster to acknowledge human to human spread when the Chinese government was still in damage control mode and WHO was following their official statements saying there was no confirmation of retransmission.
This happened 2 weeks later:
https://www.who.int/csr/don/14-january-2020-novel-coronaviru...
Taiwan had begun health screenings of travelers from Wuhan on December 31st, following their request to WHO and the China CDC for more information. By the time the first case was detected 3 weeks later they’d already activated a substantial public health plan — not because they were prescient but because SARS had given key officials a strong sense of the importance of not delaying.
That said, I think it's fair to say that some kind of response might've been faster in one place vs another... But any response at the beginning was taken out of caution (again: no healthcare workers infected, no deaths, no proof of human to human transmission)
Taiwan was obviously wise in applying caution, but did they actually publish any kind of statement regarding their beliefs for h2h transmission? (I'd be surprised if they did, since without cases there hadn't been any samples, and research on the genome of the virus couldn't start before Chinese researchers uploaded it online one January 10th)
"Based on the available information there is no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission" does not mean that there was no h2h transmission: just that there was no evidence, yet.
Everyone reading this stuff was obviously concerned, but again: if you remember, the 2nd death was only confirmed on January 15th...
In retrospect, it’s impressive how quickly the Taiwanese government moved based on the equivalent of a Reddit post including a screenshot from that Chinese doctor (Li Wenliang) who was jailed for spreading the news before it was officially acknowledged:
https://web.archive.org/web/20200417144920/https://focustaiw...
So, no, Taiwan didn’t put out a big press release on December 31st when they started the discussion with WHO, the China CDC, and others but they had started circulating what they knew in public health circles and being a free country they didn’t conceal what they were concerned about when they started screening travelers.
Here’s their statement on the December 31st email:
https://www.cdc.gov.tw/En/Bulletin/Detail/PAD-lbwDHeN_bLa-vi...
If you recall the origin of this thread, I was responding to someone who said “I don't think a strategy that needs every country on earth to cooperate this tightly ever had a chance to work.”. My point, again, wasn’t that Taiwan had secret knowledge of the future but that they showed how much could be done with basic public health protocols and, importantly, without requiring widespread international cooperation. Every sovereign nation could have started health screenings and quarantined travelers, but most waited too long and simpler methods weren’t going to be adequate by that point.
The United States meets all these criteria, and has the highest number of cases and deaths in the world. (And near the top in per-capita measures, too.)
Kind of like the EU countries talking badly about England after they discovered a more infectious mutation. In Germany at the time they didn't even sequence enough viruses to detect mutations before they're widespread.
The United States could but it doesn't because the political system is too federalized for a centralized response.
It doesn't need that though.
It needs countries to close the borders tightly except to countries that do cooperate, as many Asian countries have successfully done.
The situation right now is that you have plenty of breeding grounds for new mutations, and it only needs some minor crossing of borders for these to get through.
I would also say it's infeasible for non-island nations that need to trade with other countries to completely lock the borders.
A strategy that involves convincing every country, and every little province, to destroy their local economies, all at the same time. I can’t believe it didn’t work! Maybe if we just keep trying.
And then there are countries where the economy is based on resource extraction. Only a relatively tiny amount of people is necessary to work the oil and gas industry, or whatever, and thinktanks have sometimes bluntly referred to all the remaining millions of people as "superfluous population". So, whether you let COVID spread or not has little overall effect on the economy.
If there weren't lockdowns (and people were travelling again), our economy would be doing much better.
[With all that said, and while I dearly missing socializing, it isn't obvious to me that removing the lockdowns would improve things; on the other hand, it isn't obvious to me that letting the disease run rampant would be worse than the mental and emotional toll the lockdowns are taking on people and the economy. So many poorly understood trade-offs.]
Some examples include:
* China bringing their initial outbreak down to near-zero
* Italy arresting their early surge that overwhelmed health systems
* New Zealand bringing their infection rate low enough to essentially return to normal life (apart from international travel)
* The UK stopping a dramatic winter uptick involving the B 1.7.1 variant from overwhelming the NHS
In what way have they not worked?
Good for Italy!
Sadly, coronaviruses definitely have the potential to deliver on that. Now that so many people have become infected because lockdowns weren't taken seriously, and because poor and working people weren't protected or provided for, we're going to have to deal with every possible mutation that could be imagined. Scary situation when MERS was a thing.
The idea that the world can't wait at a fairly comfortable sustenance level for any period of time is one that might be written on our species' tombstone.
They haven't worked, and they can't work. There are many third world countries that don't have internet access or the equivalent to the CDC. Global cooperation is just absolutely not going to happen. We can't even agree city to city in the US, much less state to state.
The way out of a global pandemic is the same it always has been. Vaccination. Attempting to control individual behavior on a global scale is a fools errand.
The average American 35 year old thinks if they catch covid they have a >10% chance of dying. This is off by almost 1000x.
If you drove that error down to 0 so people knew exactly what there risks were if they got covid (i.e. for most healthy adults and children, covid is a complete non-event)... I don't think the general public would tolerate any of these NPI's at all.
The fact that people can overestimate their covid risks by almost 1000x has destroyed our ability to have rational discussions about kids in school, who should be prioritized for vaccination, and how we should return to actual normal life.
Shoveling nonstop boatloads of absolute fear into peoples head has been one of the most morally bankrupt things the media and public health "experts" have done over the course of the pandemic. Society is going to spend years cleaning up the mental health train-wreck these people have caused.
Source for the figures. Take a look. It blows me away how wrong peoples risk perceptions are of covid. https://covid19pulse.usc.edu/
Personally, I am not afraid to admit I am scared of a virus that can be transmitted by asymptomatic people, incubates for two weeks, then can kill you, but hey, I guess that just makes me a scaredy-cat. I'm willing to live with that label.
Because risks are everywhere. Overestimating your risks from covid by 1000x results in making some really, really poor risk tradeoffs.
People joke about dudes drinking bleach and stuff but that behavior was because they vastly overestimated their covid risks... so much so they completely disregarded the very real risks of... you know... drinking bleach.
Much more serious examples of bad risk tradeoffs are how many parents are handling their kids. Some of the stuff people are doing to their poor children is downright deplorable. For example keeping them completely isolated from outside contact. All of it is because their perceptions of covid risks are incredibly wrong.
The media and these "experts" have created a huge shadow pandemic of unchecked, irrational fear. Absolutely nobody seems to acknowledge it and we have to tackle it at some point in order to move past this. Unfortunately, it will require these experts to "tell the truth" about the risks of covid instead of hyping every outlier all the time.
I thought asymptomatic transmission wasn't really a thing. Is there updated data on this?
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-19802-w
Here's the best thing I've found for incubation period:
https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/bmjopen/10/8/e039652.full.pd...
The people who complain about lockdowns are also the people who refuse to do the alternative, and then claim "nothing works".
I am really tired of the "we tried nothing and we're all out of ideas" political party. Get out of the way and let people who are capable of handling things get to work.
Not a guarantee of what? Are we suggesting that we have a virus here that, unlike every previous virus, we can only reach herd immunity for with a vaccine?
Have we reached "herd immunity" for syphilis? Herpes? Was smallpox eradicated via "herd immunity" that wasn't reached via a vaccine? Polio?
It is extremely common for viruses to not be eradicated unless there is a vaccine. Even vaccines are not guaranteed to be enough, e.g. with most influenza strains, although flu vaccines have managed to keep the death toll low enough for us to move on with our lives.
Syphilis is a bacterial infection. You can get it more than once. There is no such thing as herd immunity.
> Herpes?
...is transmitted via intimate, direct contact. You don't get herpes by walking into a crowded room, and there's no way to be "immune" to herpes without also being a carrier. Herd immunity isn't a relevant concept.
> Was smallpox eradicated via "herd immunity" that wasn't reached via a vaccine?
Smallpox was eradicated by herd immunity that was achieved via a mixture of natural and vaccine-induced immunity. Initially, a large portion of the population was immune due to natural infection. Over time, vaccinations were targeted to local outbreaks.
> Polio?
We have not eradicated polio. In some (now 3) countries, polio is endemic, and outbreaks are self-regulated by herd immunity.
Herd immunity does not mean that a disease is eliminated. It means that the spread of the disease is naturally controlled.
Not necessarily "naturally".
But yes, my choice of words is confusing there. The point I am making is that herd immunity is not eradication. People (like the OP) confuse the two concepts.
You can have herd immunity in a population, and the pathogen will still circulate. Observing that a virus still infects people is not evidence that herd immunity to that virus has not been achieved.
"Herd immunity" applies to bacterial infections as it does to viral. All it means is that the R-value is low enough that the disease doesn't spread. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herd_immunity#Theoretical_basi...
As an example, pertussis is a bacterial infection which most US communities have herd immunity to thanks to the pertussis vaccine.
> You can get it more than once.
There are also viral infections you can get more than once. In fact, the South African variant of COVID is likely possible to get even if you've had COVID before.
> Mixture of natural and vaccine-induced immunity.
Sure, just like nearly every virus that has been eliminated via vaccine. As, hopefully, COVID will be. Smallpox was not eradicated without a vaccine.
> We have not eradicated polio
The vast majority of the world has indeed eradicated polio via vaccination, as made clear by the fact that only three countries out of 195 still have a polio problem. The same is true for measles, rubella, and a variety of other diseases, none of which would have been eradicated from most populations without vaccines.
The OP's stance that COVID would be somehow unique amongst viruses or diseases if it needed a vaccine for eradication ignores the history of every disease for which we've mass-vaccinated against in the 20th century, as well as the vast majority of diseases that have not been and never will be eradicated by herd-immunity-reached-through-mass-infection.
It does not apply to Syphilis. Getting an infection today does not prevent me from getting one next month. Even if it did, it doesn't materially affect the rate at which other people get it from me...unless we are rutting like rabbits in some constant random orgy.
There is an argument to be made that various strains are different viruses, and that we have herd immunity to some of them. It wouldn't make sense to invent an English name for each one, but that doesn't mean they should be treated as a single thing in all contexts.
And I even stated it as ambiguous depending on how you count strains, I'm not arguing that there is only one way to look at it!
Do you have a specific strain of flu in mind when you claim that we have reached herd immunity "to various strains" without vaccination?
There's also lots of places that don't do much flu vaccination, they don't necessarily have the same strains in circulation forever.
Herd "immunity" was never reached, at least not in the sense that members of the herd with weaker immune systems were protected due to the virus's inability to circulate thanks to widespread, strong immunity. According to this commonly-cited paper [2], nearly all modern cases of "Influenza A" (a specific type of flu) in humans have been from descendants and variants of the original 1918 virus. The variants temporarily disappeared from active circulation in the 1950s when they were initially outcompeted by the then-novel H2N2, but were accidentally leaked from a lab in the 1970s and have circulated in humans ever since. We are still plagued by variants of the 1918 flu today.
The links are in contradiction to each other, the second one kicking off with An estimated one third of the world's population (or ≈500 million persons) were infected and had clinically apparent illnesses (1,2) during the 1918–1919 influenza pandemic. The disease was exceptionally severe. Case-fatality rates were >2.5%, compared to <0.1% in other influenza pandemics (3,4). Total deaths were estimated at ≈50 million (5–7) and were arguably as high as 100 million (7).
I don't really care to argue about it, my initial comment was measured.
The "Spanish" influenza pandemic of 1918–1919, which caused ≈50 million deaths worldwide, remains an ominous warning to public health. Many questions about its origins, its unusual epidemiologic features, and the basis of its pathogenicity remain unanswered.
Which... matches pretty well with the first link. Sure, the outcome of the disease was severe, but we don't know why! And recent studies imply that it was because of sociological phenomena.
Herd immunity was defined by the theory that it would prevent the spread of measles. It only did so with any measurable effect after universal vaccination was introduced.
Look at Florida's winter wave of Covid cases vs Massachusetts. The curves are basically identical, despite vastly different pandemic policies.
In other countries yes, but in the USA, are there any real data points that can argue that states with strong lockdowns did better than states without?
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/massachusetts-co...
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/florida-coronavi...
Nothing that was done in the USA could even remotely be described as a lockdown. And none of the so-called orders came close to being effective. Without enforcement, you might as well call your "Stay at home Order" a "Stay at home Suggestion".
Currently, in the state of California, 99.8% of the population is in the purple (aka Widespread) tier [1]. Yet if you go out of your house and look around, you'll see people carrying on, horsing around, and not taking anything seriously. It's like "back to normal but with masks." And this is reportedly one of the more "locked down" states! It's a total farce, and the result of a cowardly government that makes rules for show but is unwilling to enforce them.
And if, say, the US just happens to have a permanant 10% of the population who bristle as anything related to "compliance", you simply can not contain these respitory infections, at best only slow them a bit.
The lockdowns that each state imposed were largely ineffective at a macro level in my opinion.
We say "lockdowns" colloquially but it's really a package of policies, such as capacity limits for restaurants, schools potentially closing down, etc. Which ones are the ineffective ones that Massachusetts subscribed to but Florida did not?
It's absolutely true that new cases are dropping and active cases are dropping as well but if you look at active cases everything peaked about a month after Christmas to the end of Jan before starting to decline this month. Easter is coming up on April 4th. If enough people have the vaccine + enough people have gotten it to cause herd immunity then active cases will continue to drop throughout March and April. But if the holidays are the main cause for this to spread (as in people ignore the "rules" and intermingle with non-household members as the holidays encourage) I predict another wave in April. The wave hopefully will at least be less severe then the Christmas wave was, but I do think the planet isn't out of the water yet.
So, a cautious assumption until data shows it's not accurate that "holidays lead to increased transmission" seems to me to be warranted.
Have you seen data that shows holidays don't lead to increased transmission?
It is evidence that other things can also lead to increased transmission.
If my hypothesis were "ONLY holidays can lead to increase transmission", then that evidence would falsify it.
But my hypothesis is that "holidays can lead to increased transmission", so that evidence doesn't falsify it.
The upward curve can be a result of school openings and then the sudden steep upward trajectory in the beginning of November being due to Halloween followed by continued Holiday visitation throughout Nov/Dec. There's also the messaging from the Trump administration that encouraged masses of people to ignore rules and treat the virus as if it's "no worse than the flu".
Similarly the reduction in cases can - speculatively - be attributed to better protocols being implemented nationwide; e.g. states that had lax rules having an "oh shit" moment when hospital capacities were at maximum which in turn resulted in stricter measures. Better mitigation strategies in schools across the nation is another reason. Trump's election drama diverted attention away from the "covid = hoax", so people were more willing to accept stricter rules.
Lastly - and this is something that can't really be proven so take it with a grain of salt - people are avoiding testing in order to drive down rates so the schools can fully re-open. I think we might be able to see hints of this last one in hospitalization data if those numbers remain the same while the case numbers drop.
EDIT: https://covidtracking.com/data shows hospitalizations are also dropping (although deaths only started dropping recently), so I would say that last reason for cases dropping is bullshit concocted on social media, but I'm going to leave it on this post so others can call it out as BS when they see it elsewhere
I feel like the most likely candidate is weather. Even hot places like Florida and California get cooler, shorter days, with less humidity.
Not necessarily. They also removed one big set of gatherings: Work.
Workplaces and the commute to them are massive contributors. Many people are in (loose) contact with many more people at work than at a large Thanksgiving dinner, and contact tracing is a lot more effective for the Thanksgiving dinner (everyone there is a close contact) vs. work ("oh, but they were more than 1.5 meters apart, so it doesn't count" because you can't quarantine everyone in a 100+ people open plan office that you've been saturating with infectious aerosols for 8 hours).
To be clear I don't mean "a pretty reasonable assumption" to mean it was exceptionally likely to be true (with, say 95% confidence) in my mind in this it's more like a 65% chance of being true.
I guess I was using it as shorthand for "my prior is >50%"
Anyway, I wouldn't be shocked if that assumption was wrong and if it is, it makes sense that it'd be for the reasons you outline
And yes, I get that it's considered more morally justified by many than watching football in a stadium or playing hockey. But at some point, the virus transmission in a given scenario needs to be dispassionately assessed whether you're robbing a bank or feeding orphans in Uganda.
Essentially, is there enough bias in transmission for some people to make a greater contribution to group immunity than others.
I think future civilizations are going to study this period and laugh at how foolish and naive we are thinking we have any kind of real control over this virus. The idea that outside pharmaceutical interventions mankind can somehow control a respiratory virus will be mocked by future generations the same way we mock past civilizations that sacrificed goats to appease the rain gods.
The truth is the virus is gonna do what virus do: Virus. It's just part of mother nature and we don't really have any say over its behavior. Outside vaccines and treatments we can control it just about as much we can control earthquakes, tornadoes or volcanos.
The difference is pure culture: individualism vs collectivism. In China, not wearing a mask in public makes you a pariah. There’s no such social pressure here in the west.
Once the disease got politicized, it was game over. One side took it seriously, therefore the other side had to not take it seriously, because heaven forbid you agree with your political opponent about something.
That was not a successful prediction.
There's an experimental skin test being developed for COVID-19 T-cell immunity.[3] It's from a startup which announced the test, three new vaccines, and a share offering at the same time, which raises some questions. But at least people are working on this.
[1] https://directorsblog.nih.gov/2020/07/28/immune-t-cells-may-...
[2] https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/07/15/ne...
[3] https://www.bioworld.com/articles/503586-tonix-looks-to-the-...
Why would "natural immunity" kick in this suddenly and effectively?
> Behavior didn’t suddenly improve over the holidays; Americans traveled more over Christmas than they had since March.
Yes, and then after the holidays they stayed home, so one or two weeks after the traveling seasons there were much fewer infections. I don't see why this explanation is dismissed.
Anyway, it's not so long until April, so we'll see soon if "Covid will be mostly gone by April". ("By" appears vague, but my understanding is that refers more to "at the beginning of April" rather than "at the end of April", could Americans confirm?) Of course even if it does disappear as suddenly as this person predicts, we might not be able to tell whether it was due to vaccination.
"By April" is perhaps intentionally vague, as it's such a long period of time. "This will be done by Monday" tells me not to expect it before end-of-day Monday.
On the other hand if IFR were 0.69 then the picture would be rather different - 73m. Some estimates (https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/207273/covid-19-deaths-infec...) put IFR as high as 1.79 which would mean 30m infected so far.
Gu's modeling also seems much more consistent with numbers I've seen from other papers (hospitalization and death rates).
This reads just bizarrely. The author assumes we'd be near the expected herd immunity threshold (60%) in the face of extensive social distancing? We certainly are at herd immunity in a world with interventions, but those drastically lower the base reproductive number.
https://github.com/Arkwin/US-COVID-Herd-Immunity-Tracker/
I update the data from the CDC website every day.
6% in ~22 days
At what level are we considered herd immune? When 50.1% of the population is immune/recovered?
* we are at 20%
* we need to reach 80%
* we have 60% to go
* we got 6% in 22 days
* 60% / 6% in 22 days = 220 days until the country can reopen?
And it'd be similar for who is readily willing to take the vaccine vs. will refuse to ever do so.
Why is this relevant? Because the whole concept of "herd immunity" is only about transmission.
The other studies fare a little better, but we know a lot more about the effects on any kind of Covid19 than on serious cases, or on transmission of SARS-COV-2 itself.
That seems like something that could be figured out within a week or two of the vaccine being finalized.
I have been worrying that the now all too familiar "we still don't know if the vaccine prevents transmission" is just a stand in for saying "it doesn't". Every additional week makes me less hopeful.
Just what kind of a study do you think could do that within "a week or two"?
What the trials have mostly been checking so far is “does the vaccine prevent serious illness”, and they measure that by counting occurrences in the test group vs placebo group. Very straightforward, which is why it’s possible to do it fairly quickly.
The margin of reduced transmission is very close to the margin of reduced symptoms: 90% reduction in asymptomatic transmission, and 93% reduction for symptomatic transmission.
The study is only on Pfizer's vaccines, but I would expect Moderna's to perform similarly, since they're both MRNA vaccines targeting the spike protein and they have similar effectiveness at reducing symptoms.
I'm surprised that these studies come so late. Vaccination strategies need to be quite different depending on their outcomes.
If you are vaccinated and then come in contact with someone who is infected, do you test positive? Nobody knows, really. And people you are in contact with? Unknown.
If we vaccinate those over 50 who want to be vaccinated, the death rate will plummet about 90%. Then, COVID is similar to flu level of societal death and I don't see any reason most people can't be completely normal. This ignores anti vaxers whose deaths are sad but should probably be considered closer to "negligent deaths" or something.
But this article is just wishful thinking, that boils down to "we expect us to 10x the pace we vaccinate new people over the next 40 days and actual infection rates are 2x what experts think."
I guess I hope he is right but this is probably just fantasy thinking.
I don't know the data on how many people have long-lasting effects, but I do know some people have had them.
Yes, we are down to the level we were...last fall.
> I have argued for months that we could save more American lives if those with prior Covid-19 infection forgo vaccines until all vulnerable seniors get their first dose. Several studies demonstrate that natural immunity should protect those who had Covid-19 until more vaccines are available. Half my friends in the medical community told me: Good idea. The other half said there isn’t enough data on natural immunity
> Some medical experts privately agreed with my prediction that there may be very little Covid-19 by April but suggested that I not to talk publicly about herd immunity because people might become complacent and fail to take precautions or might decline the vaccine.
Especially in the last couple of weeks the percent positive & new cases has fallen dramatically. Seemingly for no good reason. In my state, we are now consistently seeing percent positive less than 10%. After the holidays, especially Christmas, it spiked up to 25% or more. This makes me wonder if we are in fact nearing some sort of turning point as the number of folks who have contracted it must be pretty high, and people are getting vaccinated.
Are others seeing this same trend in their area?
But they are some of the only metrics we have, and if you keep the caveats in mind, I don't agree that they aren't useful.
What else would you suggest looking at? Deaths? In my state, the daily new deaths numbers are following the same trend. So if you keep in mind percent positive is heavily influenced by total number of tests, and the daily new deaths chart is following the same trend, then that seems like very positive new to me.
If you're only testing people in hospitals and reporting systems, you're going to have a much higher positivity rate.
2020 Jul = 25%
2020 Aug = 6
2020 Sep = 4
2020 Oct = 7
2020 Nov = 8
2020 Dec = 9
2021 Jan = 13
2021 Feb = 4
No matter what, you just couldn’t keep families from congregating after isolating for most of the year. So much COVID transmission happened during this time period.
Edit: to explain my point a bit: the British variant has a higher reproductive number. The existing immunity and measures in some cases can be enough to reduce the numbers of the traditional variants, while not being enough to stop the growth of the British variant. This is happening in Germany for instance right now. Currently the numbers are suddenly stagnating and soon will start to rise again while the measures stay the same.
The US isn’t going to hit 80% vaccination by April.
This is a bit overblown.
In the UK the B 1.1.7 variant is the dominant form by far, but vaccinations are outpacing infections by a long way.
Today there were 10,641 new cases recorded, and a 7-day mean of daily vaccination doses delivered of about 350k: about 35 times the current infection rate.
Infections have been falling for weeks, albeit with quite a tight lockdown. Vaccinations have been declining slightly for the past week but expected to accelerate again soon.
This includes one of the two British variants (the one from Bristol rather than the one from Kent).
You don't need 70% of immunity to have herd immunity if half the population never leaves their house: you can get away with 35%.
Those who didnt die are now the (smaller) herd and (presumedly) immune.
That said, the vaccines all seem to offer some degree of protection to the variants, naturally acquired immunity probably will too, and the virus will have to adapt to multiple vaccines and natural immunity very quickly to continue spreading.
He's completely ignoring all other reasons why infection might go down, the most important one being effective countermeasures, like wearing masks and social distancing. He's also ignoring that the case rates are stagnating due to the British variant. Germany is in that phase now. Cases of the British variant are in exponential growth, current lockdown measures are not effective against it.
There is a resistance to accepting that this pandemic is soon going to end the way that just about every pandemic in the entirety of human history and pre-history has ended: enough people have had the virus and developed some level of immunity to prevent pandemic-level spread. The only difference is that we are giving the natural process a little boost through vaccination (but not by much since we got a late start because we refused to do challenge trials, so the vaccine that was done in May was not distributed until December because more tedious and less accurate non-challenge trials had to be done).
I think there will be a hesitancy to accept this because lockdowns[0] and universal vaccination, reasonable ideas, have moved on from being points of pragmatic policy to being points of political dogma, such that they are resistant even to changing facts. And after being fed the nonsensical “if it saves even one life” line by their political heroes, it will be difficult for many people to accept that the real calculation involves accepting some “advanced” deaths (a strange concept because old folks on their death bed succumbing to the next common cold are usually not considered to have died earlier than they “should have”) for the sake of getting on with life, just like we do every year with all sorts of diseases in circulation.
It also represents of failure by the public health officials and experts. Because the vaccine was needlessly delayed, not many more lives were saved than if the virus was just allowed to run its course sometime last summer (once we discovered that ventilators were actively harmful in many cases) along with some basic precautions for vulnerable populations. We were held back by rigid medical ethics requirements banning challenge trials. So while individual cities could have hundreds or thousands of new cases per day, deliberately infecting a few hundred healthy people for the purpose of testing the vaccine was PROHIBITED. We lost half a year to this, trillions of dollars, hundreds of thousands of lives, and millions of livelihoods. All because we let a bunch of medical ethics theorists in ivory towers told us that we couldn't run common-sense low-risk trials.
I think you have forgotten this small detail.
Another detail : yes we found that ventilators were harmful, but we also found that other forms of assisted breathing like high nasal flow oxygen were effective. Additionally we found that giving steroids was effective. There are other treatments coming online now in addition to this - so when we look at delaying the pandemic and the benefit there of we need to understand that the survival rate for patients has improved over that time.
You seem to have forgotten this small detail.
When we talk about this as a natural process in a population and allowing it to happen the people it happens to in the summer rather than the winter live 6 months less. They may have written a book or a play or helped their grandchildren become the people they need to be in that time span.
You seem to have forgotten this small detail.
>When we talk about this as a natural process in a population and allowing it to happen the people it happens to in the summer rather than the winter live 6 months less. They may have written a book or a play or helped their grandchildren become the people they need to be in that time span.
As for your last point, that's not how it works. To the extent that the disease runs its course through the population anyway, then there's also people aging (and infirming) INTO the vulnerable group too, who would have lived if they caught it in the summer but upon catching it six-months later die.
Another way to look at it is that it's not any better or worse that a pandemic hits one year or the other (putting aside population growth). A flu pandemic in 1905 is no better than a flu pandemic in 1904. It just kills a different set of people.
And actually, by extending the period where the virus is in pandemic circulation, and to the extent that it will spread through the population anyway, you probably kill more people by stretching the pandemic out. Virus survivors die for other reasons, "wasting" their immunity, and like I said above, more people become newly vulnerable to the virus.
Unless vaccine
Challenge trial don't include the vulnerable groups, so how would you know if a vaccine works for them without doing the normal non-challenge trials?
Vulnerable groups are also usually much more affected by side effects. A vaccine that has no serious side effects in the small, young, healthy people that challenge trials are done on might have severe side effects in vulnerable groups.
Lets consider Gallant. Gallant does all the things to stay safe. Is the infection rate among Gallants 20%? Hell no. It's probably a 1/3 that or 6-7%.
Consider Goofus. Goofus is a dummy. He does nothing to protect himself. And hangs out with other Goofus's. Is the infection rate among Goofus's 20%? No, it's probably 3-4 times higher. Or 60-80%.
60-80% means the Goofus's have herd immunity. 6-7% infection rate means Gallants don't.
Highlights an issue with a lot of thinking about this. Population profiles aren't homogeneous but people make that assumption when drawing conclusions from simple statistics.
If those measures are so effective, why did they take nearly a year for an effect to be seen?
I see no way masks and social distancing resulted in the drop off happening now. We're at levels not seen since the mins in Sept/Oct which outruns the holiday wave. I can't make heads or tails of it.
https://apps.texastribune.org/features/2020/texas-coronaviru...
edit: the past weather has certainly had an effect on testing but the drop off predates the storm.
* The WHO updated their guidelines for PCR tests in a way that could cause this (because the tests were being misused, the new guidelines clarify how they're supposed to be used in a way the previous ones did not), except the update also happened after the drop started.
* The drop is worldwide, it seems like only a handful of countries aren't experiencing it. In most places it started at various parts of January, but here in Illinois it started in November (minus spikes that correlate to Thanksgiving/Christmas/New Years).
* There is no correlation in the US between "lockdown states" and "reopened states". It's just dropping everywhere.
My personal belief: We already hit herd immunity in most of the world a month ago. There's a few possibilities for why this would be (underestimating cross-immunity or how far the virus has spread, for example), but it's really hard to say for sure.
Not in Britain.
In England (Wales Scotland and Northern Ireland have similar but different rules because of devolution): * All schools are closed bar vulnerable children and children of key workers. * All non-essential retail, hospitality and leisure is closed. * Everyone should stay at home except for allowed exceptions like work, medical appointments or local exercise. * You can meet one person from another household for local exercise outside if you stay 2 metres apart.
Variant B1.1.7 surged in Kent (South East England) in December 2020 despite "UK Tier 4" lockdown. The transmission increasing by 70% from the initial variant overwhelmed the reduction from reduced social mingling given that rule set.
The first broad point: infections are decreasing.
I suspect that this might not always be because we are reaching "herd immunity". It could just be a side effect of stats. Also Vaccines in the USA will target the people who are likely to get tested.
In the UK infections are decreasing because we are in a harsh lockdown. The vaccine show little to no effect _yet_ (unlike israel)
As for the second point: vaccinating those who've not been infected first. Its a great idea, but difficult to do in practice. First as the author points out, we don't have an accurate, quick and cheap t-cell test, so its not actually practicable to figure out who's been infected prior to vaccination.
The author says the infections are dropping in the UK and sights that as the start of natural immunity. I say thats bollocks. Its almost certainly because of the lockdown. looking at the regional numbers, its the only thing explains a coordinated drop over the entire county.
Given that "uk" variant started in the south east, it should have caused peaks spread over time as it moved from city to city. There is no data for that. which suggests it's lockdown thats causing the drop.
UK data does suggest that the vaccination campaign is having an effect: hospital admission rates have been dropping more sharply than infection rates.
No doubt the lockdown has reduced infection rates, but there are also seasonal factors. As the weather warms up, people spend more time outdoors, windows are opened for better ventilation, etc. Covid rates will naturally drop in spring for the same reasons that cold and flu do.
https://www.ft.com/content/6d4ff17b-b3a2-4f9a-bb73-84e50ba61...
The data doesn't show that. There is a slim margin that might suggest fatalities are dropping, but not by much.
> As the weather warms up, people spend more time outdoors, windows are opened for better ventilation, etc.
February was the coldest month for a long time in the UK. Epic rain, frost and snow. People have been stuck inside.
The re-opening of schools will cause a rise in infections, the question is, how much.
I expect that the data will be much more clear in april, when about 20 million more people will be inoculated.
It takes longer for fatalities to drop because typically, there is several weeks between infection and death, and a further delay before deaths get reported. There is also a delay (weeks) between receiving a vaccine dose and achieving maximum immunity.
Death rates have also dropped fastest in the groups (such as over-80s) who were vaccinated first: https://www.bmj.com/content/372/bmj.n506
> "February was the coldest month for a long time in the UK. Epic rain, frost and snow. People have been stuck inside."
Yes, we had a couple of weeks of unusually cold weather. But it's much warmer now, and currently, that's forecast to continue.
I know this might seem petty, but its really important to split out the effect of lockdown vs vaccinations.
If the drop in hospital admissions is down to vaccinations, we'd expect to see a decrease in those in the top 4 groups that have been vaccinated, but a no decrease in other groups (like in Israel)
In the case of the UK when the general background is decreasing infections we should see a marked difference in steepness between both groups.
Now, as you rightly point out, there is normally a 4-6week lag between infection and hospital admission (this has been getting longer with improved at home monitoring). Deaths for the over 70's not so much. They are more likely to palliated, rather than put on a vent.
I am not a vaccine skeptic, I look forward to getting mine and going back into a physical office. I just want to make sure that we prove things with the data we _have_ rather than try and back fill insignificant margins with meanings they can't support. The UK is a beacon of vaccination, I want it to be robust, rather than bluster.
Yes, we're only just beginning to see the vaccine effect. Vaccine effect is now clear in hospital admissions, but not so clear in cases: https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1363480366397485056?...
https://www.ft.com/content/6d4ff17b-b3a2-4f9a-bb73-84e50ba61...
> I suspect that this might not always be because we are reaching "herd immunity". It could just be a side effect of stats. Also Vaccines in the USA will target the people who are likely to get tested.
I think the decrease of infections is more a regression to a mean -- we were seeing spikes in infection rates over the holidays (and starting a little earlier in the US, because of when we celebrate Thanksgiving) as people decided to meet friends and family indoors and unmasked. Now that the source of the spike is behind us and most cases that were part of that spike have recovered, the weekly caseload is dropping back to where it was in October and early November.
https://images.ctfassets.net/o2ll9t4ee8tq/5lcVQMPbqeYblRqbqe...
(image from the COVID Tracking Project -- https://covidtracking.com/analysis-updates/more-good-news-th...)
Currently, South Korea is showing 9 cases per million versus hundreds in most of Europe, the US, etc. so we’re still talking about many thousands of deaths avoided by keeping spread 1-2 orders of magnitude lower. If you only care about the economy, ask how much money in treatment that’s saved or the lifetime economic output of the people who died early.
Which is why the statement ‘if only we had worn the masks’ is false. And I don’t personally care but it is a sneaky way of turning people against each other and a way to avoid responsibility: If you’re a government which has wasted billions on lockdowns and it hasn’t helped, how convenient is it to shift the blame to all these silly anti-maskers.
And I mind you, I am not anti science and I am not anti masks. I am against the statement ‘if only they had worn the masks.’
About half a year ago scientific ’authorities’ here said that if you get infected you must have done something against the measures, insinuating it was your own fault. That kind of stopped now that hospital workers turn out to get infected all the time. Are they anti-maskers? Do they not know how to avoid contact? Are they careless? Or is it unavoidable? To accept that, we also have to accept that you can’t get away with simply blaming everything on anti-science noncompliance.
If cases rise, it is because "people didn't take it seriously" and "it wasn't hard enough". Result: Blame the public and lockdown longer & harder. This time, people will behave and it will work!
If cases go down, it must have been because the lockdowns work and so we should continue them otherwise cases will rise and we will be back to square one.
Never question the lockdown. Lockdowns always win! Lockdowns can't fail, they can only be failed. It's Science!
We can plot this quite neatly thanks to the fuckups that the british government made.
because the UK is made up of 4 nations with different lockdown rules, you can see the effect the various locksdowns on similar populations. you can see them here: https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/cases
But in any case, we clearly won't have herd immunity by April, so don't embrace conspiracy theories when lockdowns continue.
The issue is that if ruling parties ease up on restrictions, the opposition will immediately accuse them of "risking lives", "killing grandma", etc. The opposition here might be completely disingenuous, they might be thirsting for an end to restrictions themselves, but they can’t pass up on the opportunity to score points against the ruling party.
In polarized countries, the part of the population that opposes restrictions may even have become a slight majority. But still, as long as the opposition can use any relaxation in restrictions as a means to attack the ruling party and get just a slightly higher percentage of the vote sufficient to unseat the ruling party, the ruling party has little choice but to maintain restrictions.
I hope you reevaluate that prediction in 3 months and maybe take that opportunity to reevaluate how you view the world. Because you are make a lot of very strong, falsifiable assertions with very little evidence.
But after that, something will definitely come up. Extra crazy variants, covid-ebola-bat-soup mutation, climate panic, aliens, China did it on purpose, Russia, the impending economy crash and burn (because of reddit not government lockdowns)... who knows? Stay tuned for the next episode of The Clown Show.
Keep those bastards on their toes...
Why are the Americans doing this propaganda op ? Ionnidis' latest paper even points to lockdowns not being particularly helpful across multiple countries.
The point is that "treating" a pandemic with lockdowns causes increased depression and drug addiction.
You are making a fairly strong claim that the lockdowns (which were barely even enforced) were the cause. Generally, strong claims should be backed up with some evidence.
Covid19, even with the current measures, has killed more people than TB worldwide in 2020. Those deaths are often in addition to those killed by TB, overdose, and most other diseases you care to pick. It has let countless other people with chronic symptoms of varying severity, possibly for the rest of their lives.
Ioannidis has a bone to pick ever since his first paper on the topic was proven wrong, and he keeps digging deeper. His papers have been very low quality, with obvious holes even for a layman, like choosing to measure the effectiveness of lockdowns only in countries with known implementation problems (USA, UK, Sweden, Netherlands and a few others) while ignoring the countries that have not seen almost any cases of disease by comparison (Vietnam, Australia, NZ), as well as alternatives to lockdowns that have worked wonders, such as Taiwan.
This is complete FUD with as-of-yet no scientific support. The lifetime effects of poverty and depression, in contrast, are quite well-studied and there's strong evidence that even a single year of unemployment can have a significant negative impact on lifetime health outcomes.
>Covid19, even with the current measures, has killed more people than TB worldwide in 2020. Those deaths are often in addition to those killed by TB, overdose, and most other diseases you care to pick
The vast-majority of these people were on death's door already, whereas the people taken by overdoses and depression are in the prime of their lives.
I also find the way COVID-19 related deaths are being counted to be somewhat disingenuous. Every single person who dies and is COVID-19 positive is counted as a "COVID death." Many of those with an underlying condition may have died in the near term anyway, or on contraction of some other influenza-like virus. I think the figure which we will never know is the number of COVID-19 deaths in otherwise healthy people.
Yet, when 23 people in Norway die soon after receiving a COVID-19 vaccine shot, they are not counted as "COVID vaccine deaths." Rather, every media story I read was at pains to point out that these people were all elderly, frail and had underlying health conditions.
Then there are the other issues related to lockdowns - domestic abuse, mental health etc. The comment by `cheph` about damage to their back and hips has been downvoted to hell, and it was probably written in a combative tone. Nonetheless, these are very real problems that are not being discussed enough.
The COVID-19 pandemic is real and dangerous, but the reaction and reporting is not very well balanced.
So you support NZ's style "zero covid" policy? Because that beats the economic consequences of letting COVID run loose.
>"death's door" => an average of 16 years of life.
So because they haven't been studied, we should assume there are none? We know for sure that SARS has left most survivors with chronically reduced lung function, so there are a priori reasons to believe it is a risk for Covid19 as well.
Also, unemployment and poverty are not natural consequences of disease preparedness, they are consequences of specific policy decisions and of valuing the rights of rich people more than the vast majority of the population.
> The vast-majority of these people were on death's door already, whereas the people taken by overdoses and depression are in the prime of their lives.
No, they weren't. The majority had chronic illnesses that they would have expected to live more than 10 years with, but their lives were cut short by Covid19. Also, the majority of the increase in death rates in most places in the world has been due to Covid19.
Not to mention, the countries that took the disease the most seriously and had the most effective lockdowns ALSO had the shortest lockdowns and the most rapid economic recovery. Look at Vietnam for an excellent example. Short, localized, but quite extreme lock downs have meant that most of the country has been in business as usual mode for most of 2020, with less than 100 total deaths (total, in a country with half the population of the US living in an area the size of one state, neighboring China!), despite being the first country outside China to have community spread.
I would much rather have had COVID. COVID lasts some weeks, maybe months with long COVID, I have damage for the rest of my life.
Any reason why they did not stay home? Wear masks? Keep social distance? Avoid social gatherings?
It sounds far more likely that some poor decisions in how you managed your lifestyle and/or ergonomics during the pandemic led to those conditions.
Nobody forced you to work from your couch/bed/floor or whatever it was that caused your unfortunate condition. Ikea and Office Depot remained open nearly everywhere...
Ikea chair caused hip damage, I stood for some time which fucked my knees up, then I bought another chair for $ 1000 but damage was already done by IKEA chair, and it did not help much, compensation I had to make for hip caused back injury, then I bought another for $ 1000, still did not help.
No tax deductions, no subsidies, no free cash, nothing.
So I am now unable to work, I am out more than $2000, and I will likely lose my job and be deported now, and I will be in constant pain for hours on the flight back and will be bedridden for the rest of my life.
I would give everything I have to be able to sit at a computer and concentrate for more than 5 minutes again.