TheKingPin
Registered User
Repeat after me, we're nowhere near the level of infection that suggests herd immunity has had any significant impact.
Whether the ratio is 10:1 or 15:1 infected to confirmed infected, we're talking 5-10% infected, far too small to provide herd immunity.
What slowed things down were the month or longer lock downs, and after a few weeks, infections fall off, but because confirmed infections and deaths are lagging indicators, it takes a few more weeks for that impact to show up in the statistics.
Notice they still haven't ended the lock down in London despite the drop, because like NYC, due to the dependence on mass transit, the virus can explode if they're not careful. Subways are ideal breeding grounds.
Now a problem in the US is the chaotic testing regime (CDC mixing infection tests with anti-body tests, different rates of testing in different jurisdictions, some tests have higher false positives/negatives, etc.) makes it hard to judge trends in confirmed infections. Ideally, we'd be conducting random testing each week to see the rate of infection in the general population and its increase/decrease. But the gross incompetence of the WH has screwed up everything. The Brits have done a better, but still limited, job testing for infection.
So the only reliable measure is deaths (though even this is influenced by peak events, mortality declines as hospitals aren't overloaded and as patients are identified earlier, and out of hospital deaths are avoided), which is a 3-4 week lagging indicator (infection - symptoms - hospitalization - death).
COVID is not going to magically "go away," we know from past pandemics that as long as there's a large reservoir of infected people, any relapse in diligence will ignite a new wave - in Britain it's now spreading in the North, the way it's been spreading in the more rural areas and smaller towns in the US.
I never said her immunity. If there is a large population of people who have had it like 1/5 NYers plus the people who are symptomatic are staying home. Plus many many doing a good job with distancing. You would have a slowing of infection. Of course the lockdown had a strong effect. If we never had antibody testing then we wouldn’t know the rate of asymptomatic. And we would be making decisions similar to now. You say Georgia will take time to spike. But then you say 4 weeks to deaths increasing. But GA hasn’t had deaths increase, let alone hospitalizations or infections. Your logic would have them spiking in deaths right now.
Anecdotally, there are a lot of people who were asymptomatic at presentation at my hospital but had pneumonia. I’m sure there were many more who had no pneumonia and were asymptomatic as well. Brazilian doctor said he would not be surprised if the infection rate was 15x higher given the asymptotic they are seeing. That’s over 5,000,000 people already and they are hardly over any peak.
I wouldn’t just go off of what govts are doing when talking about what the virus is doing real time. Of course govts need to be cautious and like everything else, be late and wrong in what they do.