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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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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That's because you're using a very high IFR that doesn't appear to map back to median Serological Studies. I hope you aren't still using the "modeled IFR's" from March
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Not at all - I gave the citation for the age-specific IFR right at the start of the thread. Second tweet
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Gu estimate for infection levels (7.66x known cases) Fla. 22.2 Ga 19.5 Ariz. 21.2. Lou. 24.4 Ala. 19.7. S.C. 17.7 Miss. 21.3 Miami-Dade County 43% Seems a little high, imho....
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That 20% threshold means eternal physical distancing, doesn't it? You and I have contact with far fewer people than we did a year ago. When we go back to offices and pubs and large parties etc then the potential transmission chains will increase in number.
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So if expected mortality risk is 880k, how many lives did lockdown save?
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