I think I saw somewhere ITT that these tests are 80% effective. That means there's a 4% chance you could pass the "2 negative" criteria for being released and actually still be positive.

In the article, these people hadn't even been released from the hospital yet when they showed positive again. You'd need an amount of post-recovery time (a month?) and then coming up positive again to suggest a reinfection.

Cough into your hand, touch the tennis ball, gg

If you are going to reach herd immunity while also minimizing deaths, you are going to need to infect way more than 40%-70% of the young and healthy population. Because you want to infect as few as possible of people at the greatest risk.

Well then you won’t have herd immunity in places that have lots of olds.

It’s highly localized to what people interact with an infectious person and if most of those people are immune or not.


Let’s just hope we actually get a vaccine in the next 18 months.

Bless you.

nm. Your suggestion seems ineffective.

Thanks for this insight. Some of that was info is pretty intuitive, but other not so much.

I'm on the same side as you for this one. However, trying to establish causation to settle a bet is extremely difficult. So, even if someone thought you were wrong, agreeing on terms is next to impossible.

If hospitals are losing money from no elective surgeries and fewer people going to the ER, does this imply that people are dying from non-covid issues because they aren't getting critical treatment?

1) The type of bat that they know has a similar virus isn't a type of bat that people eat and there were none at the market.
2) The most likely scenario is that the virus jumped from bat to some intermediate host then to humans. That intermediate host may or may not be a pangolin and patient zero may or may not have been infected at the market.
3) The virus in that particular species of bat was last observed 4 years ago. There is still a lot we aren't sure about concerning the origin of the virus, but it certainly didn't come from "eating undercooked bat"

It is true that there have been a number of patients who test negative and later test positive. This may be explained by faulty test results or it may reflect that antibodies don't work properly for only those people and mostly work for others. It is possible that people don't get long-lasting immunity, but it would be exceedingly unusual. Normally when you don't maintain a long-lasting immunity it is due to rapid and dramatic evolution of the virus, which doesn't appear to be the case with this one. If you don't get immunity for a year or so, we are really and truly screwed because it probably means that a vaccine is going to be very difficult too.

Right now, the smart money says that the people who got reinfected are the result of bad test results or are somehow biologically unusual.

Regarding the accuracy of the victim count and the annoying claims circulating in the right-wing blogsphere that the counts are hyper-inflated by counting deaths from other conditions as COVID cases, I submit this article (a diary of a NYC paramedic):

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52196815

No, I let the first one go to give time to be seen.

I am definitely going to begin moving sports team predictions out though. That does not mean sports teams can not happen in this thread, it just means it isn't the place to freeball ideas. Yah freeball.

The other major reason to promote herd immunity right now is the likelihood that a second wave of the virus will be much more lethal.

This is what happened during the Spanish flu pandemic. Very few people actually died during the first wave in early 1918. The vast majority of deaths were from a new strain in late 1918. But people who caught the flu during the first strain were immune from the second strain. And cities that had a higher percentage infected during the first wave ended up with a much lower death toll overall due to herd immunity from the second strain.

We cannot wait for a vaccine. A general lockdown for 12-18 months would destroy civilization.

Undoubtedly going to be some. The husband of one of my wife's friends was recently found to have an aneurysm on his aorta. He was informed that would be elective surgery and would have to be postponed.

I guess he is just calmly waiting around for it to pop.

Economists suggest otherwise.

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020...price-covid-19
With the understanding that it's a simplistic model with assumptions that may be wrong, this still suggests that locking everything down for an extended period is an option that you can't immediately dismiss as too painful.

Can you provide a source? I made this claim in a thread on another forum but haven't been able to find a reputable source.

This back-of-the-envelope math seems ways off to me for many reasons, two being most notable:

- It assumes that the 22% drop in the economy due to the shutdown only last a years. But shutting down the entire country for a year would cripple the economy for much longer than that.

- It assigns a constant $9.5 million to all lives lost. I agree this is a reasonable figure if you assume lives lost are distributed evenly throughout the population. But they are clearly not for this virus. A most appropriate figure would be something like $150,000-$200,000 per year of life lost. I would guess that a coronovirus death averages about 10-15 years of life lost, compared with 40-50 years for typical EPA calculations.

One -very- shorthand way to look at this: what was a greater historical tragedy for our country, the Spanish flu pandemic, or the Great Depression? There’s a reason why we often refer to the “Depression Era” but never the “Spanish Flu Era”. (And the Spanish flu was almost certainly much worse than covid since it primary affected younger victims, and we’ve made so many routine medical advancements in the intervening century.)

http://www.whiov.cas.cn/105341/20191...4_5471634.html


No chance though. Maybe Russia

Here’s any article quoting Fauci with respect to immunity. Most importantly, he states that people infected in the first wave will also likely to immune to future strains in the virus, which could potentially be much more serious:

https://thehill.com/changing-america...ts-will-likely

I think this is pretty faulty reasoning/logic. You want the deadliest strains to die, a lockdown helps that a lot. Spanish Flu's deadliness had more to do with the transporting of deathly ill troops on the front lines and strong immune systems overreaction than it's waves

It’s likely that transporting troops did spread the virus more quickly, especially among 20-40 year old men, but it’s also almost certain that the second wave was a different, more deadly strain of the virus;

https://www.history.com/news/spanish...ave-resurgence

What do you base this on? Population health and life expectancy increased during the Great Depression, and has decreased during economic expansion. Suicides went up, but the overall mortality went down.

https://www.pnas.org/content/106/41/17290

That's what I'm saying though, the War was like a forced herd immunity that brought out the deadlier virus. We know the current strain going around is really bad, gotta lock it up not bug it up

I never suggested the Great Depression had a greater cost to Americans’ health. It had a greater cost to most other dimensions affecting overall quality of life. And because of that, it is certainly framed as a greater tragedy and more important historical moment in retrospect.

There's a huge difference in the prospects of this recession/depression compared to the Great Depression. Then people were literally starving and didn't have **** and didn't have **** to do. This one has way more to do with misallocation of capital/mispricing and robber barons sucking up all of the wealth from the masses, so we've got revolution/uprising outs


Joe Schmo could do that work for $20/ hour, but HEY OR MAYBE we could light fossils that have been sitting in the ground for millions of years on fire to help transport products of slavery around the world, that'll only cost us $19/hour. Brilliant idea Connor, here's a raise, and if anything goes wrong we just get more capital to **** around with.

Great system we've got going, vote for Biden to save America

I agree that the math is questionable, but it's better than going with someone's gut instincts. It's just one estimate and I use it to suggest that it's at least close enough that we can't rule out that a lockdown is the best alternative. Just because locking everything down is clearly having negative effects, that doesn't mean that there has to be a better a way. And maybe the goal shouldn't just be getting back to normal so that we can go about our business.

From my perspective, the epidemiologists and economists seem to agree that it's better to keep things locked down and I trust their judgment more than politicians who are trying to get elected and businessmen who are trying to make money.

I also don't think hospital capacity will diminish during this for any reason. But what does significant amount mean could get weird.

I think we also have to take into consideration the perspective of the opposing sects. The primary concern of the epidemiologists is likely the long-term health of our nation. However, the politicians/businessmen may have approval ratings and economics at the forefront.

It is quite obviously a cold-hearted, rationalist perspective. However, one could make a very solid argument that decimating the American economy in order to save the lives of a small percentage of the elderly and infirmed is suboptimal.

Thus when a politician or businessman wants to reopen the economy early they're technically not incorrect, even if alternative methods are almost guaranteed to save more lives.