Coronavirus Outbreak

[nett]

Do you know what the Re number is?

No, I never heard of that. What is it?

You might have heard of it as R0 or R-naught. It's an epidemiological factor for determining contagiousness.

[mike]

We'll Have Herd Immunity by April, according to a WSJ opinion column.

Key parts:

Amid the dire Covid warnings, one crucial fact has been largely ignored: Cases are down 77% over the past six weeks. If a medication slashed cases by 77%, we’d call it a miracle pill. Why is the number of cases plummeting much faster than experts predicted?

In large part because natural immunity from prior infection is far more common than can be measured by testing. Testing has been capturing only from 10% to 25% of infections, depending on when during the pandemic someone got the virus. Applying a time-weighted case capture average of 1 in 6.5 to the cumulative 28 million confirmed cases would mean about 55% of Americans have natural immunity.

***

Covid-19 deaths in the U.S. would also suggest much broader immunity than recognized. About 1 in 600 Americans has died of Covid-19, which translates to a population fatality rate of about 0.15%. The Covid-19 infection fatality rate is about 0.23%. These numbers indicate that roughly two-thirds of the U.S. population has had the infection.

***

But the consistent and rapid decline in daily cases since Jan. 8 can be explained only by natural immunity. Behavior didn’t suddenly improve over the holidays; Americans traveled more over Christmas than they had since March. Vaccines also don’t explain the steep decline in January. Vaccination rates were low and they take weeks to kick in.

My prediction that Covid-19 will be mostly gone by April is based on laboratory data, mathematical data, published literature and conversations with experts.

[Dan Z]

We'll Have Herd Immunity by April, according to a WSJ opinion column.

Key parts:

Amid the dire Covid warnings, one crucial fact has been largely ignored: Cases are down 77% over the past six weeks. If a medication slashed cases by 77%, we’d call it a miracle pill. Why is the number of cases plummeting much faster than experts predicted?

In large part because natural immunity from prior infection is far more common than can be measured by testing. Testing has been capturing only from 10% to 25% of infections, depending on when during the pandemic someone got the virus. Applying a time-weighted case capture average of 1 in 6.5 to the cumulative 28 million confirmed cases would mean about 55% of Americans have natural immunity.

***

Covid-19 deaths in the U.S. would also suggest much broader immunity than recognized. About 1 in 600 Americans has died of Covid-19, which translates to a population fatality rate of about 0.15%. The Covid-19 infection fatality rate is about 0.23%. These numbers indicate that roughly two-thirds of the U.S. population has had the infection.

***

But the consistent and rapid decline in daily cases since Jan. 8 can be explained only by natural immunity. Behavior didn’t suddenly improve over the holidays; Americans traveled more over Christmas than they had since March. Vaccines also don’t explain the steep decline in January. Vaccination rates were low and they take weeks to kick in.

My prediction that Covid-19 will be mostly gone by April is based on laboratory data, mathematical data, published literature and conversations with experts.

Well...it's an opinion piece, and he's an optimist that's for sure!

Not to rain on this rosy prognostication, but from the research I'm reading, almost every assumption he cites, from the 55% percent of population previously infected, to the .23% COVID IFR, to the 15% already inoculated, are all on the upper end of the likely range of possibilities. There is a compounding factor when a person layers one rosy scenario on top of another...soon your conclusions are at the extremes of what is remotely likely. I think that's where he lands in predicting herd immunity by April - out on the extreme edge of possible. It is certainly not the measured approach one would expect of an academic.

I absolutely hope he is right (we'll know in two months or so), but I'd rather have my feet on the ground. In the meantime, we can all take courage that infection rates are dropping rapidly...already down to the rates from late-October...and death rates will doubtless follow, especially as the vaccine is given to (and taken by) those most vulnerable.

My confidence is growing that the worst of this scourge is behind us.

[mike]

Well...it's an opinion piece, and he's an optimist that's for sure!

I think there's some real basis for optimism given the downward trajectory in cases, hospitalizations, and deaths. I am not sure but I think the current downtrend is the steepest we have seen yet. Average deaths/day have dropped from 3,000 to 2,000 in just 12 days. Cases are less than 1/3 of what they were just 4 weeks ago.

[Dan Z]

I'm growing increasingly convinced that the Public Health folks in this country, who have saved countless lives in coordinating the battle against this COVID, don't have a coherent end-game strategy for the Pandemic. It seems easier to know how to increase COVID preventative measures than to figure out how to safely and in a timely manner ease up on them.

Deaths and infection rates are still relatively high, but are dropping fast. For most places, it may not be time just yet to ease up public health measures, but that time will soon come. And if the Public Health folks don't come up with a clear way out of the current restrictions, and get ahead on the messaging, an increasingly impatient populous will do it for them - and on a much quicker and more chaotic and less safe fashion.

Is anyone seeing good end-game messaging? "Get your vaccine but keep masking and distancing anyway until we tell you otherwise" doesn't cut it for me.

[mike]

I'm growing increasingly convinced that the Public Health folks in this country, who have saved countless lives in coordinating the battle against this COVID, don't have a coherent end-game strategy for the Pandemic. It seems easier to know how to increase COVID preventative measures than to figure out how to safely and in a timely manner ease up on them.

Deaths and infection rates are still relatively high, but are dropping fast. For most places, it may not be time just yet to ease up public health measures, but that time will soon come. And if the Public Health folks don't come up with a clear way out of the current restrictions, and get ahead on the messaging, an increasingly impatient populous will do it for them - and on a much quicker and more chaotic and less safe fashion.

Is anyone seeing good end-game messaging? "Get your vaccine but keep masking and distancing anyway until we tell you otherwise" doesn't cut it for me.

Nothing new here, Dan. I never heard ANY end-game messaging at all, either good or bad, from our state government at any time during the pandemic. They never released any metrics or end goals that would give any indication of when mitigation orders would be lifted. It's all been arbitrary, and inconsistent. Even though we went through the worst wave of the virus in January, our governor lifted the ban on indoor dining at the beginning of the month right when numbers were going through the roof. If they were going by the virus numbers, it was a completely inconsistent move. Clearly they were being influenced by economic factors and public pressure.

That has been a large part of the difficulty, I think. When people have no light at the end of the tunnel, no specific point at which they know the business strictures and mask and distancing regulations will again be lifted, or especially when they see no consistency in when and how the rules are made and enforced, they tend to say phooey with it. Like you say, they just decide for themselves.

[Wayne in Maine]

Is anyone seeing good end-game messaging? "Get your vaccine but keep masking and distancing anyway until we tell you otherwise" doesn't cut it for me.

Don't forget to "Double Mask" now!

[Dan Z]

This all reminds me of what often happens with wars (e.g. Afghanistan) - they are easy to get into, but notoriously difficult to get out of.

[RZehr]

Exit strategies are exceedingly important. Even when starting a business, you should have a plan for exiting it in a safe, wise, and sane manner. No one runs a business forever, and no business last forever.

Where I work (as most businesses) everything was chaotic in the beginning of the pandemic. No one knew what was necessary and what wasn't. So businesses were simply left to come up with their own ideas and precautions to limit spread and limit liability. With time, the CDC and local health authorities have come up with recommendations and requirements. What I saw happen at our company was that the CDC and local health recommendations and requirements were simply being added on top of whatever hip shot efforts that we had instituted on our own. New requirements were being followed, but none of the original nonrequired ones were being dropped by us. We had no metric that we were going by to tell us when we could drop ill advised efforts.

Fortunately, we now have dropped all of our hip shot/homemade efforts not required by the local health authority. So now we have an exit strategy, which is simply to require what is required, and recommend what is recommended by the government. When something is no longer required, we don't require it. The problem now is rightly identified that the authorities do not seem to have one. And them not being a for profit entity, nor vulnerable to competition, have little incentive to develop an exit strategy, much less prioritize it.

[Josh]

Bureaucrats almost never give up power, particularly to pick winners and losers in business.

I expect to see big business to lobby to make sure they can keep crushing small business and claiming they are “safer”, so expect to see Main Street continue to have businesses closed whilst Wal-Mart and Amazon grow bigger and bigger.

The current government answer to this is to give business owners loans. As if they have any way to ever pay them back.