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Covid-19 #17: Covid Is For Ever


Tywin Manderly

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I think the only place of any substantial size that might be at herd immunity is Stockholm. 2,380 deaths with a IFR of about 0.4 works out to about 595K total infected, With a population of about 975K that's ~60% of Stockholm that might have been or are currently infected. If this is true then the city could pretty well operate in a completely pre-Covid, business as usual manner and the rate of infection would stay on a slow burn indefinitely. Just get the over 60s to take extra precautions when out and about.

It took 0.25% of the Stockholm population dying to get there. Some people might say that's an OK price to pay to be the first major city in the world that can party like it's 2019.

The one thing that might make the death count not pan out to herd immunity in infections is the high number of seniors who died. So it could be that skews the IFR in Stockholm to >0.5 for the moment which means it's still short of herd immunity for now. But probably still herd immunity-like with social distancing mesaures in place.

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1 hour ago, Clueless Northman said:

There's no major place which has more than 25% people who've actually been infected by covid.

This is hard to prove given that in many places where the pandemic peaked in early spring, the testing was utterly inadequate. This leaves us with anti-body testing and estimates based on the fatality rate, but both of these are flawed because the immune system has other possible responses and because the fatality rate depends on whether the vulnerable are protected and is also not all that well known.

The poster child for this is New York City (here is a link with the history and the current numbers). The total number of confirmed cases is 237K which, given that the population (after excluding the people who have temporarily left) is around 8 million, is only a measly 3%. However, this is obviously an underestimate because when the number of hospitalizations and deaths was the greatest, the testing was limited to non-existent. The number of deaths is 23,739 which, if you use the IFR of 0.4% translates to 5.9 million cases (or nearly three quarters of the population), but if you go with the higher 1%, it's only 2.4 million (or only 30% of the population).

Thus, we don't actually know the fraction of people who have survived the disease in New York City with any reasonable degree of accuracy. One fact that suggests that it is on the higher side is that despite all of the reopening measures, the city has not seen a resurgence of the virus -- it's not gone, but the number of new cases has stayed between 3 and 4 per 100K people for months even as more and more institutions reopened and people got more and more careless about social distancing. It's plausible that even if there is no herd immunity among the overall population, enough of the people who are most likely to interact with others (e.g. grocery cashiers, bus drivers, etc.) have had it that transmission is greatly slowed. The same may be true of various cities in Europe, but I don't have the data for those.

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OK. Some months ago the Tanzania's president became laughingstock because he denounced that some test turned positive after testing a paw-paw, a goat and other random samples. 

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-tanzania/president-queries-tanzania-coronavirus-kits-after-goat-test-idUSKBN22F0KF

Well. Now well respected Sweden has denounced the same. A few thousands of tests are faulty and resulted in false positives.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-sweden-testing-idUSKBN25L1XF

 

ETA: Corrected link. Thanks @Fragile Bird

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Whohoo, shit is getting real over here. Though only statistically, we are wide open and going for economic survival (and herd immunity? Who can say?). I do understand the notion but the communication around the second wave strategy, I must say, doesn’t quite exceed expectations. 

That is of course the least of the practical problems as the average Joe opinion is that coronavirus is a hoax to control people’s personal liberty and regulations that obligate people to ‘suffocate’ in masks in enclosed spaces and fine them if they refuse, is another way for the government to ‘steal from people’. (I will not go into how and why this misguided and unfounded use of the word ‘steal’ made it into the public’s top five favorite and overused words) As a result the public turned into a mass of naughty schoolchildren (this is another national attribute of ours I suppose) who giggle behind the teacher’s back as they cut corners and find loopholes because rules and regulations are for the grownups who imposed them and they know everything better than the teachers anyway. Yes, the loudspeaker just said you must wear masks in here, but it’s just a formality, it’s totally okay if you don’t, we won’t tell. 

Today alone we had 970ish (this is 0.01% of the total population) new cases (we break daily new case records every day at this point), but schools will stay open, businesses will stay open and we are essentially counting on the public’s personal responsibility (fueled by the threat of a spiffing €25 fine, should one be found without mask on public transport). Experts say the real case count is around ten times the confirmed one, as we test so very little. Which puts the infection rate around 1%. This is not much relatively but as the newly infected are primarily 18-35 year olds the virus is spreading rather quickly. The younger and stronger pass it on to several others before they realize they are ill if they realize it at all.

State funded testing protocol only tests if someone’s a close contact to a confirmed case or was abroad in the past 14 days or shows all mandatory symptoms (fever, dry cough, chest pain, loss of taste/smell). Most young people have much milder symptoms, never get tested (private testing is around €100 - compare to €1000 average monthly salary) and even go on about their business with a sore throat or mild cough. Hard to count on public discipline and responsibility this way. I don’t see any other control mechanism (although there may be some introduced as we march into the colder seasons), so essentially that shutting of the borders everybody was so upset about two weeks ago is now keeping the virus inside rather than outside so at least our neighbors are safe(r) around us. Life is ironic.

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7 hours ago, rotting sea cow said:

OK. Some months ago the Tanzania's president became laughingstock because he denounced that some test turned positive after testing a paw-paw, a goat and other random samples. 

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-tanzania/president-queries-tanzania-coronavirus-kits-after-goat-test-idUSKBN22F0KF

Well. Now well respected Sweden has denounced the same. A few thousands of tests are faulty and resulted in false positives.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-tanzania/president-queries-tanzania-coronavirus-kits-after-goat-test-idUSKBN22F0KF

 

 

 

You posted the same article about Tanzania twice.

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11 hours ago, Fragile Bird said:

Ya, I wanted to ask Altherion just exactly where these places with herd immunity were.

That was Free Northman Reborn who was on the herd immunity kick.

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9 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

Just as logical as needing a gun because someone might punch you, or throw a bag at you, because it's equal force....

Or that Elon Musk is going to save humanity by delivering us to Mars.

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5 minutes ago, Week said:

Or that Elon Musk is going to save humanity by delivering us to Mars.

We need to travel to Mars to escape from those roaming hordes of barbarians after the world collapses. We also need all the guns to stop them! 

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AstraZeneca is resuming it's vaccine trial in the UK.  But they aren't releasing any additional information about the two holds, citing patient confidentiality issues.  Not sure how they can morally justify this when they thought it was ok for the CEO to brief some investors in a private call earlier in the week about the two holds.  They are working with other countries to restart the trials.

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'Herd immunity' per se can only be achieved by artificial means, i.e. vaccination, as we did with measles and so on, until the cray-cray anti-vaxers threw their cray-cray wrenches into it.-

As with the Great Influenza of 1917-1920, herd immunity was never achieved either, despite the huge death toll and infections.  The virus itself eventually mutated into something generally less harmful and has remained in circulation ever since.

 

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1 hour ago, Mudguard said:

AstraZeneca is resuming it's vaccine trial in the UK.  But they aren't releasing any additional information about the two holds, citing patient confidentiality issues.  Not sure how they can morally justify this when they thought it was ok for the CEO to brief some investors in a private call earlier in the week about the two holds.  They are working with other countries to restart the trials.

won’t they have to release that info anyway when the trial ends?

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4 hours ago, Week said:

That was Free Northman Reborn who was on the herd immunity kick.

That may be so, but I suggest you just look at the posts right above, in post 206 Altherion says his only comment about herd immunity was that there may be communities where herd immunity has been achieved. In 207 Clueless Northman says nobody’s hit 25%, and in 208 I say I was going to ask where exactly these places with herd immunity were located.

So, pay attention!

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4 hours ago, Filippa Eilhart said:

won’t they have to release that info anyway when the trial ends?

I think the FDA will have access, but I'm not sure whether everything they consider is made part of the public record.  If the data is going to be released anyway, why not release it now?  I suspect that any publicly accessible report may only have a limited amount of information, like the conclusion of the hold review, but not any of the supporting details.  That's what we have for the first review hold, at least so far. 

The lack of transparency is problematic, especially with all the skepticm surrounding the politicization of the vaccine.

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AZ is not under any obligation to make their information public. They only need to justify resumption of the trial to the regulators in the countries where they will be seeking volunteers. They may have to disclose some info to potential volunteers for informed consent purposes, but the public has no legal right to know. Shareholders and investors though, so have more of a right to know.

I didn't think this 2nd case would be a reason to cancel the trial completely, it is a severe condition the person got, but it has causes other than vaccine reactions. If they get a second one in the next round of dosing, that will be a problem and potentially fatal for the AZ vaccine. Though not necessarily. If they can isolate the precise  cause they could tweak the vaccine and reduce the risk sufficiently to go again.

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