Herd Immunity in April?

[Dean Hoffman]

The author is a professor at the John Hopkins School of Medicine.

[gfretwell]

I am not sure he means zero positives, just a rate low enough that we can relax a little. I am also not sure he is right. Time will tell. Humans do have a way of spontaneously getting over this stuff The Spanish flu just sort of went away.

[Ed Pawlowski]

Not really

[Dean Hoffman]

Yeah, that part didn't pass the common sense test.

[trader_4]

He may be a professor, but much of what he says doesn't conform to obvious reality. Like this:

""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. "

Traveling, family gatherings, parties, shopping, etc all increased dramatically from Thanksgiving through XMas. Many people didn;t give a damn and refused to comply with requests to limit gatherings. So why wouldn't that be a big part, probably the dominant reason why new cases peaked around Jan 8? There was a rapid decline last spring too, when infection rates were still low and there was no possibility at all of heard immunity. As soon as we reduced emergency measures, it took off again, peaking in July, again, that cycle had nothing to do with heard immunity. This last up cycle looks like more of the same to me. Part of the decline can certainly be attributed to more people having already had it and to the vaccines, but to attribute it only to that is ridiculous. He also states falsely that people who have had it have great immunity and that if they do get it again, they don't have severe cases. I read about documented cases where people got infected again within six weeks or so of having recovered. Two cases in particular, they had far more severe cases the second time and died. IDK what the overall data is, but he flat out stated that the second time isn't as severe.

[rbowman]

There are studies claiming the pandemic subsided when after it killed off the TB cases. The observed incidence of TB dropped dramatically after 1919.

[gfretwell]

That is what I alluded to when I said "just a rate low enough that we can relax a little". If you remember I also said many times, this may become a seasonal ritual of getting your latest and greatest Covid shot, like the flu shot.

[Fred]

Doesn?t explain why it killed so many young and healthy people.

Because that?s when vaccination and mass xrays started.

[Tekkie©]

On Sat, 20 Feb 2021 04:37:10 -0800 (PST), Dean Hoffman posted for all of us to digest...

Does this follow the proper narrative? I don't think so. But time will tell.

[rbowman]

Young, but not necessarily healthy.

[Fred]

They were in fact much more healthy than those who it didn?t kill.

Very few of them had TB.

Stupid fools cant even manage to work out the difference between cause and effect and coincidence.

TB doesn?t kill that quickly.

[Neill Massello]

He is a surgeon, not a virologist or epidemiologist, writing outside of his area of expertise in a publication that has an axe to grind.

"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."

This is speculation, and it's probably wrong. My speculation ? and I'm not a virologist or epidemiologist either ? is that many people have overestimated the ratio of silent (unconfirmed) infections from the beginning. There's been a lot of wishful thinking about this virus, and some of it has come from people posing as experts.

[Neill Massello]

Michael Osterholm, of the University of Minnesota's CIDRAP, has pointed out that rosy predictions about herd immunity were blown out of the water by what happened in prisons, where the virus didn't slow down until nearly all the prisoners had been infected.

[Muggles]

A captive population is not a good sampling group for measuring any sort of prediction.

[Muggles]

Herd immunity happens in an open environment where NOT all people actually get infected.

[rbowman]

Everyone isn't as brilliant as you.

[Neill Massello]

Herd immunity happens in ANY environment ? eventually. The question is how many members of a herd must get infected (or vaccinated) before their immunity serves to protect the remaining members of the herd from infection. By reducing the other variables such as distancing, the prison "experiment" shows that the number for SARS-CoV-2 is MUCH higher than Makary's 55%.

[rbowman]

otoh, the Marion facility in Ohio had around 2000 positive cases, most of which were asymptomatic. I could never get hard figures on the deaths but despite having an aging prison population they were minimal. Had the cells been filled with dying prisoners the media would have been all over it.

[Muggles]

Evidently, it doesn't.

[Muggles]

People can't seem to make up their minds. One person brings up the prison where everyone was infected, then complains herd immunity doesn't work, and someone else counters that argument and conclusion.