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by WildParser 2213 days ago
Btw. The statistics to calculate herd immunity to 60-90% were extremely flawed. They used numbers that came right out of superspreader-events. The most likely thing for COVID-19 is, that it has R0 < 1. It will spread by using a series of superspreader-events and will disappear after a while. Check out Michael Levitt for some understanding of the mathematics of COVID-19... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8aHrx68IT7o
1 comments
chimprich 2213 days ago
I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. If R0 was <1 then we would never have had an outbreak in the first place.

I don't believe Levitt's interpretation. I certainly hope it's true, but I don't think it is. He seems to believe containment measures have no effect, which is implausible to me.

He's just talking about the stats, without giving a biological hypothesis for why infections would top out - that seems to be coming in an upcoming video that hasn't been released yet.

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WildParser 2213 days ago
With local superspreading-events you can get an outbreak without needing R0 > 1. There can be fire without the world burning down. Levitts math works extremely good - you can calculate the entire German death-curve perfectly. In fact there is no constant R - the model is completely different.

I'm also a bit sceptical about his conclusions. The effects of containment measures aren't really visible in the curve, but e.g. Sweden has a much worse exponent - increasing the chance for more outbreaks will also change the parameters for Levitts curves. I think Germanys curve got very slightly worse recently (shops opening - masks didn't compensate). But I'm not sure if masks did anything at all - there is no clear trend-break in the growth-rate of Germany. Also masks may just keep a local population infectious for a longer time - increasing the risk for visitors.

One biological hypothesis is that covid-19 spreads in local clusters - and has a hard time to move to other places. (e.g. it might need 20 minutes of close-contact talking) The growth-rate is shrinking exponentially (something that Levitt noticed, and can be seen everywhere)- each outbreak locally is trapped and doomed to fizzle, because it is competing with itself - it's just not mobile enough to move to another location before it burns out to maintain a constant R=1.

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