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.
-
-
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
Show this thread -
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
Show this thread -
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
Show this thread
End of conversation
New conversation -
-
-
Why 100k more if total needed is 500k? Doesn't that mean ~300k more?
-
Yes, typo! Meant to say 100,000s
End of conversation
New conversation -
-
-
This is the most likely scenario. 100K sounds scary, but looking back in 12 months it would be negligible as sadly most of these would have been due to die in the next 12 months. eg The UK has now had 8 weeks of lower all cause deaths. In summary, it's equal to a bad flu season
-
"100k sounds bad, but it's not if you don't actually care" is what this dismissal sounds like.
- Show replies
New conversation -
-
-
Sadly most of the anti-maskers would say how does this compare to a flu season, then say, so what (61,000 in 2017-18 by the way) https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2017-2018/archive.htm#:~:text=CDC%20estimates%20that%20influenza%20was,the%202017%E2%80%932018%20influenza%20season ….
Thanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
-
-
-
I guess we will have to live with that! People die from falling down the stairs.
Thanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
-
-
-
You lost me on this one- 100,000 more deaths than…?
Thanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
-
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.