| > Moreover, Germany has conducted a randomized serological survey of the population of one town where there was a large outbreak... 1. Results showed 0.37% mortality rate, which is an order of magnitude lower than the fatality rates being published, which is what I claimed -- so I re-iterate: "The numbers we're seeing are an upper-bound, by an order of magnitude." [1] 2. 14% of their town has had it already. [1] 3. That 0.37% rate includes all the old and at-risk folks which I was already suggesting we isolate. Since we know the fatality rate for them is 9% in hospital vs 0.1%, I'd suggest that the actual mortality rate of my plan would be incredibly low. [1] We don't know the demographic distribution of the town, and we do know that the disease is incredibly age-dependent so it's hard to project that onto the population. Either way the flu is 0.1% so this isn't 10X worse, it's 3.7X worse. At most. 4. The study shows 15% of them are already immune to COVID. [edit] I found the data [2]. Out of a population of 12,000, 6500 of them are in a risk group (over 45). So 55% of town. This needs to be projected onto the world population factoring into account non-linear risk response. > Because a large fraction of the population is immune to the seasonal flu (both through vaccination and previous infection), far fewer people contract it than would contract CoVID-19 in an uncontrolled epidemic. I don't think they are. The flu mutates regularly, and there's a ton of strains. Vaccinations are only 19-60% effective depending on the year. This is evidenced by the 650,000 worldwide deaths (60,000 US) and the 45,000,000 US cases of the flu each year. [1] https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/04/09/999015/blood-tes... [2] https://www.citypopulation.de/en/germany/nordrheinwestfalen/... |
... which a substantial fraction of the population is immune to. Only 5-20% of the population gets the flu each year. CoVID-19 will infect 60-70% of the population, at a minimum, unless measures are taken to contain its spread.
> Results showed 0.37% mortality rate, which is an order of magnitude lower than the fatality rates being published
I've seen most people assuming a mortality around 1%, which is not that far off from these results. In Italy, 1% may well be correct, given how the healthcare system was overwhelmed there.
> I'd suggest that the actual mortality rate of my plan would be incredibly low.
If you can successfully shield the entire at-risk population, which easily approaches half the population of many countries. Once you add up old people, obese people, people with diabetes, smokers, people with heart conditions, and all the other at-risk groups, you come to a sizeable fraction of the total population. Trying to shield those people while the virus infects most of the rest of the population sounds incredibly risky to me. It's not even obvious that you can achieve natural herd immunity without at-risk people getting sick, because you need 60-70% of the population to get sick.
Overall, I don't understand the motivation behind such a risky plan. Why not just go through a 6-week period of lockdown, and then control the epidemic afterwards with extensive testing, good contact tracing and social distancing measures? Countries other than the US appear to be successfully implementing this strategy. Some, such as South Korea, were acted competently enough that they didn't even require the lockdown phase.