Projecting the transmission dynamics of SARS-CoV-2 through postpandemic period (opens in new tab)

NYC population is 8.4 million. Their death rate is 6,589 (Apr 13). 0.1% of 8.4 million is 8400, that would mean almost everyone in NYC has been infected, I'm not sure that is feasible at the moment.

https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/doh/downloads/pdf/imm/covid-19-d...

The people who were treating that hypothesis as an absurd conspiracy theory last month probably won’t own up to it, but I do hope they are reading.

South Korea’s fatality ratio at the time was obviously lagging, and has since gone above 1%. The true infection fatality rate might still be low but certainly the final case fatality rate won’t be, even with their mass testing.

Ah, but if you do a sample of 1000 then even low numbers of positives are still statistically significant. The poisson distribution on just 6 might be somewhat wide but you can give a reasonable confidence interval (ie 0.3-0.9%) - and either end of that interval still suggests a lot of undetected cases at a time when there was hardly any officially.

What you can't do - statistically - is say "oh there were just 6, that means it all could just be a coincidence and the prevlence is actually very low".

Especially when - if you dig into the numbers they make sense. First, they were spread over a 2 week period, with all the positives being in the second cohort - which is what is expected if there's an exponential explosion of cases going on. Secondly, 4 of the 6 positives are in the Edinburgh area which is the most internationally connected and affluent area of Scotland.

So I really don't think it can be breezily dismissed just because you don't like the data. But as you say, we'll have a lot more serological data before long so lets see.

Here's an expert thread (for example): https://twitter.com/richardneher/status/1250533354560159745

That is not the case for this study, see here for why:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22879363

That's happening right now with Sweden and it's sure to be a pretty interesting case study. Their health system hasn't yet been overwhelmed, but they've had a lot of cases (and a lot of deaths), especially on a per capita basis for a smaller country:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/15/sweden-coronav...

Of course, some right-wing media outlets have still been touting this as a success and a model for a less economically-damaging approach— this article is from nine days ago, but it's not hard to find other similar ones:

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/coronavirus-response-...

It's probably much too early to say one way or another, but I guess there is some value in having multiple approaches be tried. Particularly in a world where guys like Glenn Beck have gone on record saying they'd "rather die than kill the country."

Yeah no this is not happening, the young people will revolt before that. You can suspend civil liberties for a few months, that's fine, but not intermittently over several years. No way that governments in western countries will get away with that. I expect this to be an event that will remove most baby-boomers from power and bring in the millennial generation, they expect us to support ~5 old people through most of our productive life and now they created or are about to create debt that we will have to pay off for the rest of our lives. A lot of it is to prop up pension schemes and assets which are primarily owned by old people and projected to have collapsed by the time a 30 year old will retire.

> Chances are, some region will decide against doing that, and their outcome will provide a clear incentive for everyone else to be more rigorous about it.

I used to have a poster along these lines in my office. https://despair.com/products/mistakes

> Every time the death rate spikes, we'll have to lock down again.

this will likely cause more business failures than a prolonged shut down. Starting up and shutting down a business is not free. There are legal costs and you need to source materials for operations. In the case of restaurants in particular, there will be loss due to spoilage

I'm starting to doubt this.

What about Sweden vs Norway -- sure, the data is 4X worse for Sweden, but we are only talking thousands of infections and hundreds of deaths. Maybe this can't scale to bigger countries though.

The common cold is dangerous to people? The flu, sure, but I never heard of people dying from a cold. I'm sure it happens, but in comparable numbers though? I don't think so.

Maybe we could give them to people who aren’t at-risk though, so they are more likely to fight off covid -19 and less likely to transmit it around.

Normally modern medicine doesn't make people sick deliberately, because some percentage will always have some time of reaction. And the US is also a litigious society.

However, I'm in favor of ending lockdown and letting corona virus run its course, just like the flu every year. That's the fastest way to get herd immunity.

“Run its course” = 2-3% of the population die due to the virus.

I think the billions in research might be a more humane alternative.