The people that have it or still have immunity should slow the spread when it is a significant percentage of what is needed for herd immunity, and make it easier for social distancing to work.
Doubtful it's a cover up. I've already done what you are talking about. Let's look at the covid death data from the states, CDC total excess death data, and excess deaths from non covid medical issues for Florida. From 2/16/19-6/15/19 there were 74,408 deaths. From 2/15/20-6/13/20 there were 79,277 deaths This amounts to a difference of 4,869 deaths. There could still be more deaths reported during those weeks but more than likely 99+% of the deaths have been reported. Now the difficult part is matching things up because of reporting timelines. If we look at Florida on 6/13/20 they had 3,016 reported covid deaths. As of last week there were about 3,880 excess deaths from non-covid medical issues. I'd have to go back in look what that number was at around 6/13/20 but if I'm guessing (@KingCheetah doesn't like guessing) it would probably be around 3,000 or so deaths in that category. So what does all this mean? We were somewhere around 6,000 covid + non covid medical deaths in Florida around mid June. Around mid June there were also about 4,900 more people dead comparing 2019 to 2020. The death numbers might not be perfect, but they do line up pretty close. This pattern is seen in Texas as well and other states.
If you look at France, Italy, Spain, Sweden, UK, New York, New Jersey, etc aka places where the virus ran out of control then it certainly seems like there is a possibility of herd immunity being active. It could a combination of fewer potential hosts for the virus as well as better knowledge and protection. I had posted a theory from a data scientist awhile back that herd immunity could potentially be significantly lower than initial estimates (between 20% to 40%) based on how the virus spreads more in super spreading events like 1 person infecting 100 (and generally related to social events) rather than 1 person spreading to 3 then to 9 then to 27. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.27.20081893v3.full.pdf+html https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-tricky-math-of-covid-19-herd-immunity-20200630/ https://jsmp.dk/posts/2020-05-07-herdimmunity/ Anyhow, the bottom line is we have absolutely ZERO clue how widespread covid actually is and antibody tests don't seem to provide reliable data to track infection spread either. Sorry, I have to keep using conditional words and phrases @KingCheetah but we don't have all the information on covid so we have to go by rough sketches. Do you want me to speak more in absolutes when we don't have absolute certainty?
This isnt scientifically correct since anyone can become a superspreader. Superspreaders arent a static definite population that once gets immune, superspreading stops. Instead more superspreaders take their place. The latest from SCIENTISTS is at least 60% needed and no country in the world has even reached 20%.
Feel free to read that study I linked. They used science to show different outcomes. Also, no not anyone can become a superspreader. They have to be socially active. Grandma sitting at home or in the nursing home isn't going to go out and spread it to 100 people. A minority of the population is responsible for the large majority of social interactions.
historically, do we actually have any instances of 'herd immunity' without any kind of vaccine/treatment or...you know, lots of death?
From today's mayoral press conference regarding active cases: - the city doesn't do a good job of clearing active cases because they're not following up when people finish being sick from covid - clinically, recovering from covid means being symptom free for a week (or something, i forget). Basically, the answer by some dude (not the mayor) seemed pretty straight forward. The recovered cases is an under count.
Thanks for posting that. I had been wondering about this for exactly that reason for a bit. It has to be hard to officially confirm someone has recovered.
these science talk with big words and equations is hurting jontro's head. so we close to a vaccine or naw?
The concept of herd immunity is still very questionable considering we don't even know if long term immunity is possible from this disease.
This is an old article but I just heard this on the news last night. It appears that the covid antibodies diminish over time. Tom Hanks was saying that his have been dropping drastically. "Levels of an antibody found in recovered COVID-19 patients fell sharply in 2-3 months after infection for both symptomatic and asymptomatic patients" https://www.reuters.com/article/us-...tients-decline-quickly-research-idUSKBN23T1CJ So you may be Superman for only a couple of months. If that's the case, then I don't see how herd immunity will apply.
I just saw this note on the dshs website: "Texas is reporting 10,791 new confirmed COVID-19 cases for Wednesday, July 15. The San Antonio Metro Health District has clarified its reporting to separate confirmed and probable cases, so the Bexar County and statewide totals have been updated to remove 3,484 probable cases. The local case count previously included probable cases identified by antigen testing but not those from antibody testing or other sources." So DSHS is removing antigen positive tests (rapid 15 minute tests). So that accounts for a 3000 case reduction. I hope you're right that cases are topping off, but I am not confident. It's also unclear to me why they're treating antigen positives as probable when the only FDA approved antigen test (Sofia 2) has 100% specificity and 80% sensitivity. So it's very unlikely to give you a false positive but fairly likely to give you a false negative. Maybe Bexar county was using a different antigen test kit?
Antibodies is not the only way your body remembers how to fight out infections. What's also important is memory B cells and memory T cells. Those memory cells are actually what gives you lasting immunity to a disease. Antibodies decreasing fter an infection has been fought off is normal and expected. Many (maybe all?) lifetime or long term vaccines work by inducing production of memory cells. https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/pubs/pinkbook/downloads/prinvac.pdf
Awesome - thanks for clarifying that. That makes me feel better. Also side note - I thought asymptomatic people were all young. I thought old people (like myself) had so many old person issues that if you had covid, you'd know it somehow. I found out yesterday that someone older than me has it and has no symptoms.
