What kind of statistic would be an indication of herd immunity? I assume it would be some small number(s) but not zero.
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What kind of statistic would be an indication of herd immunity? I assume it would be some small number(s) but not zero.
I don't think there's any real consensus on that, especially if you're looking at number of infections or deaths. From everything I've read it appears we'll reach herd immunity when somewhere between 60 to 85% of the population have either been immunized or developed natural antibodies through prior infection, and I haven't seen percentages anywhere which take naturally developed antibodies into account.Quote:
Originally Posted by LDAHL
When I hear people talk about daily or weekly infection or death rates I wonder how that compares to pre-Covid numbers for infection or death by other types of virus that Covid has now apparently usurped. I haven't been able to find that type of comparison anywhere so I think quoting numbers without comparison doesn't really tell us much.
I'm sure different people measure it different ways. But case numbers are not the most reliable indicator.Quote:
Originally Posted by LDAHL
1) There are many people now self-testing at home and those numbers are not reported, and are largely negative.
2) There are false positives.
3) There are people who may test positive but are asymptomatic, with no impact from the virus.
Better indicators are numbers of hospitalizations, patients in the ICU, and deaths, though death numbers have been manipulated, at least in my state, to inflate the numbers. For instance, I believe I have posted before about a coworker whose father died of old age and the medical examiner was forced to change the cause of death to covid because there were covid cases in his assisted living facility. He did not die of this, but because of this false label even the immediate family was not allowed to attend the burial in the VA cemetery. There has been lots of paranoia and false information out regarding this virus.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Alan
CDC data is super easy to find.
Attachment 3771
We’ll only know what constitutes herd immunity with hindsight. My guess though is that a state with just over 1% of the US population having almost 500 cases per day is not herd immunity. If it does that would mean that the US as a whole would average over 47,000 cases per day or 17 million per year indefinitely. Compared to other diseases that doesn’t sound like herd immunity. In the US Polio dropped from 35,000 cases in 1953 to 5600 by 1957 to 161 by 1961 thanks to widespread vaccinations. Measles, when a major vaccine push happened in the late 70’s dropped 80% between 1981 and 1982. Cutting cases of covid from roundly 36 million per year to 17 million per year would not seem to be indicative of herd immunity.
It is difficult to know for sure because of differences by state as far as mitigation measures go but strictly by the number of cases California would seem to be closer to herd immunity than CT with a seven day average of 1,878 cases for a population ten times CT’s. As would Alabama with a 7 day average of 342 cases and 5 million population. As well as a variety of other states.
So herd immunity would be the point at which a sufficient percentage of the population has natural or vaccinated immunity that the aggregate likelihood of the disease being transmitted from one person to the other declines to some very low probability?
I heard a story on NPR about a person who died because she refused to get the vaccine. The reporter described covid as now being a preventable illness. I think that is true in the US.
Meanwhile I checked in with a guy I used to work with who has family in India. He told me the outbreak should peak there this month. So that is the natural immunity route.
You would think people would choose the vaccine route but if they don't that's on them and the rest of us shouldn't be restricted for years or decades until all of them who are vulnerable die off.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herd_immunity?wprov=sfti1Quote:
Originally Posted by LDAHL
My state has now reached the 70% herd immunity level but we are still stuck wearing masks - except of course the governor, who even indoors removes his so he looks better at his news conferences. And I've noticed there's no plexiglass in front of his mouth either. I reported him for violating covid guidelines but I have not received a response.
Does that 70% have any scientific basis behind it, or is it just a number the President threw out because we were on track to get there anyway?Quote:
Originally Posted by Yppej
I heard the number before he was in office.Quote:
Originally Posted by LDAHL
It depends on the infectivity of the virus as to what the actual percentage is- its not an across the board number. Though you probably already knew that and were just politicizing.Quote:
or is it just a number the President threw out because we were on track to get there anyway?
https://www.webmd.com/lung/what-is-herd-immunity#1
I’d only ever heard the 70% mentioned by the President. If it’s not an across-the-board stat, who does it apply to?Quote:
Originally Posted by herbgeek
70% is a guess as to how many people need to be in inoculated before the spread of the virus will steadily decrease. We will only know the actual number once we hit it and case counts steadily and mostly continually fall. It won’t happen uniformly across the country because different areas will have different levels of vaccination.Quote:
Originally Posted by LDAHL
As new more infectious variants continue to develop the number of vaccinated people needed to have herd immunity will increase.
The other thing people often seem to forget when discussing the percentage of people needing vaccination to achieve herd immunity is that the percentages quoted of vaccinations usually only count the percent over age 16. For instance in my county 85% have had one shot and 71% are fully vaccinated. But that ignores that 45,000 of the county’s 255,000 people are under 16. When you add in the kids the number of people vaccinated are 70% one shot and only 50% fully vaccinated.
So the 70% is more of an estimated inflection point where things start getting better, than a sort of end stage herd immunity? That makes sense to me.Quote:
Originally Posted by jp1
Exactly. The estimate of R0 for covid, the average number of infections each infected person causes in others, is believed to be roughly 3. Without vaccinations or other mitigation efforts (masks, distancing, limiting gatherings, etc) the disease explodes across the population because that’s an increditbly high R0. One infected person infects threw more, who infect nine more, who infect 27 more, etc. The flu, by comparison is thought to have an R0 of about 1.5.Quote:
Originally Posted by LDAHL
Herd immunity happens when the number of people available to get infected due to not being vaccinated is low enough that each infected person infects, on average, less than one person. With an R0 of 3 that means that roughly 2/3 of the population needs to be vaccinated so that 2 of the 3 people the infected person would have infected won’t get sick.
It depends on the value of R_nought for the disease in question.Quote:
Originally Posted by LDAHL
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiped..._vs_r0.svg.png
Note that some of the new variants have a higher R_nought....
Also consider that unvaccinated people serve as an R&D lab/ecosystem for the virus to develop more virulent strains...
Further consider that dorks who refuse to social distance and wear masks are helping breed a better virus...
Frankly, I'm about to withdraw from any form of public service, I've given up.
Our narrative in this country for a long time has been in favor of safety over freedom "if it saves just one life it's worth it". It's okay to take away people's freedom forever if it keeps one person from dying from covid according to some. We can gut our economy. We can run up huge deficits. We can live in fear of hypothetical variants (rather than shut down international borders to prevent them getting here). And apparently now we need to all put our lives on hold forever for people who refuse to get the vaccine. Canvassers are going door to door trying to convince them - I don't think there's more we can do in my state.
I think you are the only person I've heard issue that opinion.Quote:
Originally Posted by Yppej
None of the professionals I work with, who have managed the response in my County, which has had some of the best results on Earth, have ever muttered such a thing. But what do they know, they just do this for a living, and have training and experience.
Carry on.
Perhaps it helps to realize that it really doesn't matter very much what some holdouts from the vaccine in the U.S. do (except to endanger those who really can't take vaccines etc.) so long as the virus is spreading uncontrolled in much of the rest of the world, that could breed a better virus itself. And international travel to the U.S. has never, will never it seems, be shut down. And are we even testing arrivals? I doubt they are quarantined. And much of the rest of the world is predicted to be vaccinated in 2023 or something! Well that doesn't sound very fast.
So someone in the U.S. refuses because Tucker Carlson or something, yea but solve India or that's a far bigger breeding ground anyway, and humanitarian crisis, that too. When the rests of the world has access to the vaccine then holdouts will be the bottleneck preventing elimination. Of course vaccines also continue development. So we may well get vaccines that handle all variants even if we don't have them now. I'm not convinced it needs to be a yearly shot but we'll see what is available.
lol, if that was true it wouldn't be so car-centric. think about it. We accept a lot of deaths for it.Quote:
Our narrative in this country for a long time has been in favor of safety over freedom "if it saves just one life it's worth it".
but the BS you talk about is not how actual political freedom is defined, it's about right to protest etc., it's not about the right to open or go to restaurants in a pandemic. Noone wants your BS "freedom". Freedom's just another word for dying in a pandemic. Bah, get if off me.Quote:
It's okay to take away people's freedom forever if it keeps one person from dying from covid according to some.
I mean sure there are places where life is very cheap indeed, probably way overpopulated, and poor, and so it's taken as a given. I didn't know that was what we were aspiring to.
I listen to the BBC a lot online. The local UK oriented stations, not the World Service. Radio 5 Live is their talk radio station. Anyway, I might have mentioned last year that when there was talk about relaxing some restrictions, more than a few people called up and said on the air that anyone who wanted to get back to even a semblance of regular life was a “murderer.” So SOME people seem to think that having a destroyed economy, people’s livelihoods destroyed, etc., are worthless if the plague is still out there.
Frankly, I still think international travel bans should have been continued.
I think there’s a sort of freedom/responsibility spectrum people fall on. Freedom isn’t functional in any reasonable sense unless we accept the personal responsibility that comes with it. At one end of the spectrum are the people who childishly want what they want with no regard to any consequences. At the other are people so fearful of consequences that they decide individual liberty is a luxury we can’t afford.
I think most people are mature enough to act on the best advice without a gun to their head, and that the deliberately obtuse science deniers and the pecksniff scolds are both outliers. Otherwise this country would either be impossible to live in or not worth living in.
That would be a pity. Understandable perhaps, but still a pity.Quote:
Originally Posted by bae
Think of the people who aren’t dangerously stupid.
"Our narrative in this country for a long time has been in favor of safety over freedom "if it saves just one life it's worth it"."
Oh, please. We had nine mass shootings last week and no one batted an eye.
And over the last seven days an average of 650 covid deaths every day. That works out to another 237,000 dead people if it stays that high for another year. But some people are trying to claim that we’re already at herd immunity. So absurd.Quote:
Originally Posted by JaneV2.0
States like Minnesota and West Virginia are giving people advance warning mask mandates will go away. That way if this bothers them they can get off the fence and get vaccinated. Makes sense to me.
We have so called mass shootings all the time in Chicago. No one but the locals gives a sh*t.Quote:
Originally Posted by JaneV2.0
I can't talk on my phone in the car on speaker phone, even though studies show all the buttons people have to press to take or initiate a handsfree call on bluetooth are more distracting than what I did for years, because heaven forbid one person die in a car accident, everyone's freedom must be curtailed. It is not just with covid.
Wow, you are certainly oppressed. It must be terrible.Quote:
Originally Posted by Yppej
I can't drive drunk or with drugs in my system. Now I say what drugs I put in my body is my business, and that filling the prisons up with harmless drug crimes is just wrong*, but the police continue to enforce DUIs nontheless (they say I might kill someone, now might is doing an awful lot of work here don't you think, a lot of things *might* happen am I right. And as if I care about whoever I might kill anyway, I don't even know them!!) TYRANNY. Absolute tyranny.
* ever have a conversation with someone who has got a DUI, because I've actually seen it argued it was a "harmless drug offense", never mind the massive metal object
To be fair, the ASL translator does not wear a mask while translating at the press conferences, and whoever is at the podium speaking removes their mask while at the podium, not just the governor.Quote:
Originally Posted by Yppej
The translator I am fine with.Quote:
Originally Posted by rosarugosa
No covid deaths today in Massachusetts. Nada. Zip. Zero. None. But yet we must wear masks.
I was happy to see Rachelle Walensky taken to task today in a Congressional hearing.
I'm there. I will not be renewing my Nursing License. Enough of this ignorance. I shall not be a target of higher risk nor put my family in that target.Quote:
Originally Posted by bae
Let them all take care of themselves. Enough is enough.
I do not know your lives.
I do not know your resources or your breaking points.
but i offer you John Stewart Mill “Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.”
Or Jana stanfield “[you] cannot do all the good that the world needs, but the world needs all the good that [you] can do.”
The mask could prevent a death two weeks from now though.Quote:
Originally Posted by Yppej