Posted on 05/15/2021 7:01:26 PM PDT by MinorityRepublican
Another day, another precipitous decline...continues to look good and 4 week trend is quite favorable.
Looking good!
It is going to be nice to watch this thing go down.
Enjoying my new mask-free life already...
Nearly there but not quite. What is the magic number to reach herd immunity? It appears that anywhere between 70% to 85% of the population needs to get vaccinated.
My guess is we are there and this is why there is the precipitous drop in cases. Between natural immunity and vaccinated, I am comfortable that there is 70% immune roughly.
Colorado had a blip up for about a month but is heading back in the right direction again. 6 week low on the rolling 7 day case average today.
HIT is 1-1/R0. R0 for the worst variants is roughly 4.5 - 5.3, giving us HIT of 77% - 81%. Reach that in a given geographical area and Rt will remain below 1, meaning total case numbers will inexorably decline toward zero.
P.1 (Brazil variant) and the South Africa variant have shown some reinfection and vaccine breakthrough potential. I would take maybe 20% of the estimated 93 million COVID-19 infections as solid (given previous papers on neutralizing antibody titers in recovered patients from mild vs severe disease), giving us some 18.5 million solidly inoculated (including against all known variants) recovered patients and another 122 million fully vaccinated. Assuming minimal overlap, that puts us at about 140 million or 42%. There’s another 34 million who’ve already had their first shot, but not a second. Add them in (pretty much all should be fully vaccinated within the next few weeks) and we get to 174 million or 53%. That leaves ~87 million remaining to definitely break the HIT.
Given the expanded access to vaccines for new groups, incentives being offered, and increased convenience (no more fighting for appointments), combined with the rate of new infections (breeding additional inoculation through infection recover), I think we’re on track to reach this in July. Same timeframe I’ve been giving since February. My math hasn’t changed much during that time. We’re right where I said we’d be at this time.
COVID-19’s days are numbered and that number of ticking down. We’re almost through this thing and it’s great to see the mandates and restrictions going away finally.
That’s all you’ll see between now and July: short-lived, regional blips. A minor outbreak will hit an area, rapidly run into a wall of inoculated persons, and return to baseline. No more national spikes. In July, you won’t even see much of that; just small, very localized transmission events that rapidly disintegrate.
Last year we saw a major national wave starting in June. We won’t see one this year. The fourth wave (March/April 2021) was a dud that fizzled quickly. We’re mostly done with this thing.
Yup finally turning around. I think we were in the leading edge of the fourth wave but it was dampened by the vaccination effort. Most of what we have in the hospital is younger (<65) unvaccinated people.
My guess is we are there and this is why there is the precipitous drop in cases. Between natural immunity and vaccinated, I am comfortable that there is 70% immune roughly.
70% nationally seems about right. Here in Georgia, we're probably closer to 55% immunity with a rather low 30% fully vaccinated. New cases and hospitalizations have been trending slowly but steadily down nonetheless with a PT rate now down to 3%.
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