Re:Covid-19 Antibody Seroprevalence in Santa Clara County, C...
by danieltillett on Friday April 17, 2020 @05:20PM
(#22903070)
The problem with herd immunity to this virus is how short the immunity to corona virus is - around a year. If we wait for herd immunity to build from low level natural spread then we will never get there.
There is a very major risk with extrapolating the Santa Clara data in the motivation of those being tested has not been controlled. Who is more likely to want to know they have been infected - those who have had classic COVID-19 symptoms or those who haven’t.
Re:Covid-19 Antibody Seroprevalence in Santa Clara County, C...
by Animats on Friday April 17, 2020 @08:01PM
(#22904154)
How short the immunity to corona virus is - around a year.
Source? Right now, that seems unknown - too soon to tell. A few months of measuring antibody levels and we'll know more.
Re:Covid-19 Antibody Seroprevalence in Santa Clara County, C...
by danieltillett on Saturday April 18, 2020 @06:02AM
(#22906612)
This is what we know from other human corona viruses. SARS-CoV-2 could be different, but without evidence I would not want to bet on long immunity.
Yes. Stanford's recent study says 2-4% of the population of Santa Clara County has been infected. Those are probably reasonable bounds. Herd immunity is around 80% for this. So about 20 to 40 times as many people need to die before it's over.
That test needs to be repeated weekly to get the growth rate. (Preferably not with the scheme from Verity, which requires that you sign up for a Google account.[1]) Now that California hospital admissions and deaths for COVID-19 have flattened, growth should be linear for a while. But the rate of increase is still not really known.
Still, we're probably looking at a year and a million deaths in the US, within a factor of 2 either way.
[1] https://verily.com/stories/the-project-baseline-covid-19-pro...