[null and void]

30% with antibodies. What percentage is regarded as "herd immunity"?

Bring Out Your Dead

Post to me or FReep mail to be on/off the Bring Out Your Dead ping list.

The purpose of the “Bring Out Your Dead” ping list (formerly the “Ebola” ping list) is very early warning of emerging pandemics, as such it has a high false positive rate.

The false positive rate was 100%.

At some point we may well have a high mortality pandemic, and likely as not the “Bring Out Your Dead” threads will miss the beginning entirely.

*sigh* Such is life, and death...

If a quarantine saves just one child's or one old fart’s life, it's worth it.

[little jeremiah]

Well well well...probably the crud we and everyone else in the valley had half the winter was cv.

[BDParrish]

Blessed Lord’s Day to you Null!
“Herd Immunity”
Here on FR people seem to use their own proprietary definitions for things as you were wisely pointing out the other day with CFR, case fatality risk, which they call case fatality rate. Here they changed that to mean the number of people dying solely because of COVID-19 over against all humans who have coronavirus antibodies. These definitions are fine until you try to compare this epidemic with historical epidemics.

In the case of this term, “herd immunity” would mean that susceptible people are partially protected because there are so many people immune. The virus cannot find them to infect them. The term does not presuppose eradication or suggest that eradication is possible without a vaccination program, because new births are happening and as more people are born the infection returns. The wikipedia article on “mathmatical modeling of infectious disease” is what I am going by.

What are you really asking? I wonder if I know, but I think that the term will probably not help with convincing people to restart society. Traditional established mathmatical epidemiology has not been followed by so many even here on our forum that there is no way for people to realize that there are legitimate models that can answer these questions. In other words, IMHO, those who reject mathmatical epidemiology should not borrow terminology from it.

Without an accurate R-naught you cannot compute the herd immunity threshold anyway. Estimates for this disease run from 83% to 94%. So if we say we go back to society when we reach herd immunity it could be years.