Posted on 05/12/2020 5:24:12 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
Isolation doesn’t work.
Dr. Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, says the SARS-CoV-2 virus sweeping the U.S. cannot be shut down by simply isolation or social distancing. Instead, the virus will spread until herd imminity kicks in.
“This damn virus is going to keep going until it infects everybody it possibly can,” Osterholm said Monday during a meeting with the USA Today editorial board. “It surely won’t slow down until it hits 60 to 70%” of the population. That’s the number that would create herd immunity and end the spread of the virus, he said.
Herd immunity kicks in when a majority of people have been exposed to a virus and thus built up antibodies, which — for many viruses but not all — means people cannot be reinfected.
Osterholm warned that a second wave could reappear in the fall, just as the flu disappears for the most part during hotter and more humid seasons.
“It’s the big peak that’s really going to do us in,” he said. “As much pain, suffering, death and economic disruption we’ve had, there’s been 5 to 20% of the people infected, … That’s a long ways to get to 60 to 70%.”
But the virus is most dangerous to the elderly. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC), in it’s latest filing on May 6, put the “provisional death count” at 44,016. The age of death breaks down like this:
0-54 — 7.8%
55-64 — 12.3%
65-74 — 21.2%
75+ — 58.6%
And because the coronavirus can be asymptomatic in as many as 50% of those infected, there are likely millions who have already had the virus but didn’t even know.
An antibody study was conducted last month in New York City and found that 1 in 5 (21.2%) of residents have already been infected with the coronavirus. There are 8.5 million people in New York City, so that would mean 1.8 million New Yorkers have had the virus.
At the time of the study, there were 16,249 deaths in the city attributed to COVID-19, which means the death rate in the city was 0.89% at the time — far lower than reports in the U.S. media.
Results of antibody survey last month in Los Angeles also found as many as 442,000 Los Angeles County residents might have already been infected with the coronavirus by early April, a number far higher than the 8,000 cases confirmed at the time. The survey suggested that the death rate from the virus could be as low as 0.18% of COVID-19 patients, which means the actual death rate in the city is far lower than reported.
Meanwhile, professor Michael Levitt, who won the 2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2013, says the lockdowns ordered by state governors were a complete overreaction to COVID-19 and may actually backfire.
Levitt, who teaches structural biology at the Stanford School of Medicine, has been analyzing the COVID-19 outbreak from a statistical perspective ever since January, according to Unherd.com.
He says that despite all the predictions, the data show that the COVID-19 outbreak never actually grew exponentially, which means the draconian lockdown measures were most likely unnecessary.
According to UnHerd:
His observation is a simple one: that in outbreak after outbreak of this disease, a similar mathematical pattern is observable regardless of government interventions. After around a two week exponential growth of cases (and, subsequently, deaths) some kind of break kicks in, and growth starts slowing down. The curve quickly becomes “sub-exponential.”
This may seem like a technical distinction, but its implications are profound. The ‘unmitigated’ scenarios modelled by (among others) Imperial College, and which tilted governments across the world into drastic action, relied on a presumption of continued exponential growth — that with a consistent R number of significantly above 1 and a consistent death rate, very quickly the majority of the population would be infected and huge numbers of deaths would be recorded. But Professor Levitt’s point is that that hasn’t actually happened anywhere, even in countries that have been relatively lax in their responses.
With some of these antibody test numbers, it probably already has.
I agree with this. Infections may slow down over the summer, but ultimately this will percolate through the populace until the majority of people have been infected. I also think we are doing a better job treating patients who get severe cases.
Because they thought they had accidentally released a virus from their Biowar experiments (See "Gain-of-Function") into their general population. As indeed they most likely did.
And all the other Governments wound up getting that same information eventually. But nobody wants to start a war over this little "oops". The oligarchies running all major counties have too much to lose. So - "it was the Wuhan Seafood Market as the source". "Just one of those things".
It is heartening to realize that Government bureaucrats across the world universally tend to exaggerate progress reports on major programs. COVID-19 is more infectious, but less lethal than expected, and continues evolving in that direction. Also, a lot of very smart people are discovering various treatments that seem effective.
We are gonna be OK. Well, most of us anyway.
Pretty much what my daughter RN) told me a few weeks ago - if you’re gonna get, it, you’re gonna get it.
I keep seeing articles about the antibody not being accurate. I not sure if I trust those test yet, maybe CA has a bunch of bad test.
“Pretty much what my daughter RN) told me a few weeks ago - if you’re gonna get, it, you’re gonna get it.”
I have seen a lot of researchers’ state this fact.
Because the chinee researcher(s) who studied the "gain of functionality" of the PRRA strand they had inserted into the virus RNA took a huge viral load and died from it, but not before they went out and infected a bunch of other people in Wuhan.
The chicoms knew it was an escapee from a bio-weapons lab, knew that it could be fatal, knew that it had "gained functionality", but were still in the dark as it pertains to its lethality.
And then took the conscious decision to let it spread to the rest of the world in the hopes that it would damage the world's economy as much as President Trump's tariffs were damaging china, and betting that they would come up with a means of containing and treating the bug before the rest of the word - now infected - spread the disease back to the rest of china.
chinee act of war.
I agree with your take that it accidentally escaped from the lab near the market. Also, that this research had obvious bio-war applications. And further, that a war wouldn’t fix any thing for anyone.
And, in case it happens again, the live market is still there to blame.
One question I still have is why Fauci (and for that matter the labs at UNC and in Canada) were dumb enough to be sharing this research with the Chinese. Sure, there’s a ready answer in that all knowledge is good, and we were cooperating with them. But the Chinese interest in biowarfare was well known, and accidents have happened at various times with this sort of research (a Russian anthrax escape comes to mind).
Even though we may hit the deaths the "modified models" predicted (100K+), and we'll never know how many may have died if nothing was done, we're past the point where continued shutdowns are more beneficial to anyone....the Dems are now pushing for a Bernie type socialism even though they knew it wouldn't fly if this never happened...I hope the People haven't forgot what it was like a few short months ago.
We've learned a lot in the last six months. The virus is clearly a lot less lethal than originally feared and the most severe affects are extremely skewed to the elderly and those with significant other health issues. These people need to be kept isolated. The rest of the world needs to get back to some sense of normalcy so that we can build up the herd immunity that is the only way this really ends.
Moreover, we now have effective treatments that can reduce severe outcomes even further, which is why treatments like early administration of HCQ+Zinc+Azythromycin at initial diagnosis are now becoming standard in places like France and other countries that are not fixated on expensive new drugs and far-off vaccines, and are also increasingly being used prophylactically by healthcare professionals and those who most at risk.
Complicating this is local officials and administrators who are reveling in their new-found dictatorial powers and the political motivations of those who only view this through the lens of what can yield an electoral advantage come November. That needs to be dealt with separately, and no doubt it will be. But it's really up to We the People to start pushing hard against the local jailers.
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