Since everyone's talking about herd immunity in the United States at the moment, I thought I'd quickly run some rough calculations of the number of deaths required to get to the herd immunity threshold for COVID-19 in the U.S.
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"But wait!", I hear some people cry, "The herd immunity threshold is lower than 70%!" Well, maybe. If we reduce the threshold to 20%, which is one of the lowest figures proposed, we see either 880,000 or 504,000 deaths depending on who gets infectedpic.twitter.com/uciCBcJUiL
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What this means is that even in a 'best case' scenario, where elderly people are protected AND only a small fraction of people need to be infected to reach herd immunity, the U.S. would still be facing 100,000 more deaths Pretty scary stuff
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With a more realistic situation, where elderly people are protected a bit but you still need 40-50% of individuals to be infected, the U.S. would be facing well in excess of 1 million MORE deaths than it already haspic.twitter.com/9mNlNROgI0
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As I said, these are very back-of-the-envelope calculations, so they're certainly not exact predictions, but it gives you some idea of what we would expect to see if the U.S. does try for herd immunity in terms of deaths
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This is, of course, assuming that it is possible to reach herd immunity at all. It is still entirely possible that the immunity to COVID-19 does not last long enough for herd immunity to be a realistic possibility
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End of conversation
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There’s an error in your calculation here. If you’re striving for 70% infection in the population and proportionally exposing older age groups less, then you’d be exposing younger age groups more which should lead to more deaths in those age groups. I’m not seeing that here.
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Was this trend always the case or was it in the very beginning that those >65 were infected more frequently and have since changed behaviors/benefited from masks/distancing?
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Interesting points
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