(this post is going to be made from the POV that persistent immunity of at least a year comes for 99.99+% of COVID infectees. I believe the science supports that, but if anyone wants to say reinfections should be accounted for, I can't stop you.)
For America, if you start with some assumptions that I think are pretty uncontroversial and conservative (22% of the US already infected, a current ratio of 4 undetected infections for every 1 case detected, a current Rt of about 1.15) then ... the die is cast, more or less.
At those numbers, absent any change to transmission rates, we reach 50% infected by New Year's Day and 75%+ by Inauguration Day.
Will that for-sure happen? I don't know. The only two things that could change transmission rates at this point are behavior changes or the slowing effect of population immunity. I don't think there's much mood for behavior changes. Even liberals have reached an "I can do whatever I want as long as I wear a mask" stage. And the weather is going to put an end to outdoor activities soon. Plus the holidays. If anything, we can probably guess behavior is gonna get worse.
So what effect will population immunity have? That's still plenty controversial. Does it burn out at 40%? 60%? 80%? What about overshoot? Well, we're going to find out who was right empirically this winter.
The herd immunity turds are going to get what they wanted, no matter how wrong they were. It's gonna be a bad winter.
A vaccine is basically irrelevant for the US at this point, we're gonna resolve this by the time one could be mass-administered.
I think you are neglecting to account for the effect of fear of the virus which rises as hospital beds fill. We saw it in Texas, Florida and Arizona where things turned over despite an utterly inept local response. I think you will see R bubble around and about 1 in local areas, falling and rising as fear takes over and then recedes. I think this wave too will fall back due to people realizing their might not be a bed for them in their local hospital.
Peoples pretense that this doesn't frighten them is a lie. It does.
I think the Dakotas and most of the midwest are actively trying to disprove your point. So far, their transmission rates and deaths have been skyrocketing, and their governments and public have done seemingly nothing to slow it down. I've heard some pretty dire things about the shape of the hospital system out there, but I'm not sure where they are quite capacity wise. I wish them the best luck, I really do. They really need to start getting that fear you're talking about, but it might be too late already.
Herd immunity just ain’t gonna happen. Ever. It’s fantasy.
The mink thing isn’t new, we’ve known that COVID can jump to other mammals, like dogs, has been a thing for quite a bit now. As was said upthread, COVID jumping species is full on bad news and anyone acting as if COVID will be dealt with because everyone eventually gets it is 100% horseshit.
The new part of the mink thing is that it had transitioned back to humans from minks. Was that known already? And it seemed to spread pretty widely among the mink populations there.
Anyone catch the end of the notre dame game last night? Just a giant mob of people crowding together as hard as possible with minimal masking. It was kinda fuckin harrowing to watch a potential super spreader just happen. Then again i was watching live streams of times square earlier in the day so uh... next two weeks are gonna be interesting as far as infection counts go I'm guessing.
Notre Dame's leadership has demonstrated it doesn't give a fuck. So not a surprise the students didn't either. Shameful there was that big a crowd to start with though.
Self-righteousness is incompatible with coalition building.
Looking at the regional distribution, where you live is far more a factor than overall infection rates. The central/northern US states have absurd infection rates compared to the the high-density regions of the East and West Coast and despite people being enormously more spaced out.
I observe the standard precautions of minimizing contact, social distancing, washing hands, and wearing a mask and, despite traveling a stupid amount for work, still haven't gotten COVID. This includes going into several of the hottest areas in the Western US at peak COVID times, before it finally started getting hammered through the moron skulls of certain segments of the population to just wear the fucking masks.
I think it's entirely possible that I won't catch COVID before we get this under control, even though it means skipping a lot of fun stuff I wish I could be doing.
yeah, I'm already (not) doing all of that. I just got this horrible sense that it was inevitable anyway, and then... :bigfrown:
feeling a little better, now. for the moment.
Things are very very bad. But the only way for them to get worse is for you and people like you to lose hope. Every day you go without catching the virus is good. It's not false to say that there is a slim chance every day that some random drug is found with an incredible off target effect, or even an on target one that is hugely beneficial to this disease.
People here will tell you im an optimist, others in this thread are very pessimistic. But, you have gotten through global respiratory pandemics before. You were alive before 1990, so you faced dozens of flu pandemics with no vaccine. You didn't get sick in every one of them. Don't think that infection is inevitable tomorrow, or that because you didn't get sick yesterday your odds are worse tomorrow. Every day is a new set of odds, and you can make every day strongly in your favor.
Herd immunity just ain’t gonna happen. Ever. It’s fantasy.
The mink thing isn’t new, we’ve known that COVID can jump to other mammals, like dogs, has been a thing for quite a bit now. As was said upthread, COVID jumping species is full on bad news and anyone acting as if COVID will be dealt with because everyone eventually gets it is 100% horseshit.
The new part of the mink thing is that it had transitioned back to humans from minks. Was that known already? And it seemed to spread pretty widely among the mink populations there.
Spreading back and forth among animal species is how you get Covid-20+. That can lead to some unpleasant surprises.
My lead at work got quarantined because he hung out with another coworker outside of work who is waiting on a test. Now I have to get in the robot, Shinji, and lead a work crew that’s a third smaller.
(this post is going to be made from the POV that persistent immunity of at least a year comes for 99.99+% of COVID infectees. I believe the science supports that, but if anyone wants to say reinfections should be accounted for, I can't stop you.)
For America, if you start with some assumptions that I think are pretty uncontroversial and conservative (22% of the US already infected, a current ratio of 4 undetected infections for every 1 case detected, a current Rt of about 1.15) then ... the die is cast, more or less.
At those numbers, absent any change to transmission rates, we reach 50% infected by New Year's Day and 75%+ by Inauguration Day.
Will that for-sure happen? I don't know. The only two things that could change transmission rates at this point are behavior changes or the slowing effect of population immunity. I don't think there's much mood for behavior changes. Even liberals have reached an "I can do whatever I want as long as I wear a mask" stage. And the weather is going to put an end to outdoor activities soon. Plus the holidays. If anything, we can probably guess behavior is gonna get worse.
So what effect will population immunity have? That's still plenty controversial. Does it burn out at 40%? 60%? 80%? What about overshoot? Well, we're going to find out who was right empirically this winter.
The herd immunity turds are going to get what they wanted, no matter how wrong they were. It's gonna be a bad winter.
A vaccine is basically irrelevant for the US at this point, we're gonna resolve this by the time one could be mass-administered.
I think you're miscalculating because not all of the 22% of the US that's been infected is *currently* infectious. Only about 1-2% of the US is currently infectious. We can hold out for a vaccine.
(this post is going to be made from the POV that persistent immunity of at least a year comes for 99.99+% of COVID infectees. I believe the science supports that, but if anyone wants to say reinfections should be accounted for, I can't stop you.)
For America, if you start with some assumptions that I think are pretty uncontroversial and conservative (22% of the US already infected, a current ratio of 4 undetected infections for every 1 case detected, a current Rt of about 1.15) then ... the die is cast, more or less.
At those numbers, absent any change to transmission rates, we reach 50% infected by New Year's Day and 75%+ by Inauguration Day.
Will that for-sure happen? I don't know. The only two things that could change transmission rates at this point are behavior changes or the slowing effect of population immunity. I don't think there's much mood for behavior changes. Even liberals have reached an "I can do whatever I want as long as I wear a mask" stage. And the weather is going to put an end to outdoor activities soon. Plus the holidays. If anything, we can probably guess behavior is gonna get worse.
So what effect will population immunity have? That's still plenty controversial. Does it burn out at 40%? 60%? 80%? What about overshoot? Well, we're going to find out who was right empirically this winter.
The herd immunity turds are going to get what they wanted, no matter how wrong they were. It's gonna be a bad winter.
A vaccine is basically irrelevant for the US at this point, we're gonna resolve this by the time one could be mass-administered.
I think you're miscalculating because not all of the 22% of the US that's been infected is *currently* infectious. Only about 1-2% of the US is currently infectious. We can hold out for a vaccine.
This is total back of the napkin stuff, so you could do it different ways and get different numbers. It's just an exercise to show the scale of what we're dealing with.
We've got 10m confirmed cases right now. This is a disease that hides asymptomatically in most people who get it, and we aren't doing nearly enough testing, so there's way more infections than confirmed cases. The CDC in the summer was estimating a 10:1 ratio. If I go conservative and say 7:1, that's about 20-25% of the population already infected.
We are currently adding cases at a 7-day running average of 107,000 per day. If we assume that our testing has gotten *way* better and we're down to a 5:1 ratio (which I don't think we're doing that well, look at how many red states are barely testing at all), that's still 535,000 new infections per day, or 1.14% of the US population this week.
The estimate of the serial interval hasn't changed at about 5 days. A conservative estimate of the current transmission rate in the US is 1.15, so each case yields 1.15 in the next serial interval.
At that transmission rate, 535k new infections per day turns into a million per day by the end of November. At that point, we're adding 2% of the US population per week. And then it doubles again by Christmas.
Will it follow that exact path? I don't know. Ideally, people will notice that the hospitals are filling up really soon and get scared into compliance. And despite the bizarre insistence to the contrary in parts of the internet, the portion of your population that is already infected definitely has a downward pressure on transmission rates, so there will be some slowing as you pile up more. But we've also got all the seasonal upward pressures working against us as the weather drives people indoors and the holidays are coming up. We could just as easily see transmission rates spike even higher as we could see them lower, I honestly don't know.
It feels like we're about to re-learn the lesson in exponential growth that we learned in March. It's gonna get bad *fast* from here. Maybe faster than we can react even if we want to react, and I'm not sure we (as a country) want to react.
(this post is going to be made from the POV that persistent immunity of at least a year comes for 99.99+% of COVID infectees. I believe the science supports that, but if anyone wants to say reinfections should be accounted for, I can't stop you.)
For America, if you start with some assumptions that I think are pretty uncontroversial and conservative (22% of the US already infected, a current ratio of 4 undetected infections for every 1 case detected, a current Rt of about 1.15) then ... the die is cast, more or less.
At those numbers, absent any change to transmission rates, we reach 50% infected by New Year's Day and 75%+ by Inauguration Day.
Will that for-sure happen? I don't know. The only two things that could change transmission rates at this point are behavior changes or the slowing effect of population immunity. I don't think there's much mood for behavior changes. Even liberals have reached an "I can do whatever I want as long as I wear a mask" stage. And the weather is going to put an end to outdoor activities soon. Plus the holidays. If anything, we can probably guess behavior is gonna get worse.
So what effect will population immunity have? That's still plenty controversial. Does it burn out at 40%? 60%? 80%? What about overshoot? Well, we're going to find out who was right empirically this winter.
The herd immunity turds are going to get what they wanted, no matter how wrong they were. It's gonna be a bad winter.
A vaccine is basically irrelevant for the US at this point, we're gonna resolve this by the time one could be mass-administered.
I think you're miscalculating because not all of the 22% of the US that's been infected is *currently* infectious. Only about 1-2% of the US is currently infectious. We can hold out for a vaccine.
This is total back of the napkin stuff, so you could do it different ways and get different numbers. It's just an exercise to show the scale of what we're dealing with.
We've got 10m confirmed cases right now. This is a disease that hides asymptomatically in most people who get it, and we aren't doing nearly enough testing, so there's way more infections than confirmed cases. The CDC in the summer was estimating a 10:1 ratio. If I go conservative and say 7:1, that's about 20-25% of the population already infected.
We are currently adding cases at a 7-day running average of 107,000 per day. If we assume that our testing has gotten *way* better and we're down to a 5:1 ratio (which I don't think we're doing that well, look at how many red states are barely testing at all), that's still 535,000 new infections per day, or 1.14% of the US population this week.
The estimate of the serial interval hasn't changed at about 5 days. A conservative estimate of the current transmission rate in the US is 1.15, so each case yields 1.15 in the next serial interval.
At that transmission rate, 535k new infections per day turns into a million per day by the end of November. At that point, we're adding 2% of the US population per week. And then it doubles again by Christmas.
Will it follow that exact path? I don't know. Ideally, people will notice that the hospitals are filling up really soon and get scared into compliance. And despite the bizarre insistence to the contrary in parts of the internet, the portion of your population that is already infected definitely has a downward pressure on transmission rates, so there will be some slowing as you pile up more. But we've also got all the seasonal upward pressures working against us as the weather drives people indoors and the holidays are coming up. We could just as easily see transmission rates spike even higher as we could see them lower, I honestly don't know.
It feels like we're about to re-learn the lesson in exponential growth that we learned in March. It's gonna get bad *fast* from here. Maybe faster than we can react even if we want to react, and I'm not sure we (as a country) want to react.
Its probably about 330k cases a day as of a week or two ago judging by deaths divided by suspected IFR? Depends on how bad transmission can truly get. Remember that its a very locally spikey disease, it gets super bad in a place, then wanders off somewhere else and gets terrible there. It's not spreading through a neat, well mixed and homogonized population. Even inside local areas you have people being very cautious to the point they are very well protected and can't spread, and people just mingling together like idiots. You're going to get an explosion, followed by cases falling back, followed by people reemerging and mingling, and cases going back up again.
Still, it's important for everyone to remember that whether SOCIETY is doomed to mass infection or not, it doesn't mean you have to be. YOU can take sensible precautions and do a great deal to stay safe.
the numbers above say that "not getting it" is soon going to become effectively impossible.
I'm on the wrong side of 50, overweight, probably prediabetic, and unemployed. I've got too many risk factors and I'm not going to get good care. I'm just going to die, or worse.
I want you to know that I'm honestly sorry it feels this way. There's some real bad stuff going down. But when someone feels like doom is completely inevitable, that's usually some dark emotional stuff whispering in their ear and trying to convince them of that. I've been there, it's not easy to deal with.
I'm a big believer that you have to confront the truth in all its forms. So obviously, yeah, it's bad out there. But it's not "certain doom" bad, not even for you. That's also the truth.
First, there's a lot you can do to protect yourself. There will be a portion of the population that holds out until a vaccine, and you can give yourself the best chance to be in that group with your decisions.
Second, it's not certain, but a lot of experts suspect that the amount of virus you are initially infected with could be a strong determiner in how serious your progression is. So even if you *do* get infected, your choices can help you have a better chance of it being mild.
Third, and I do *not* want to downplay this thing because it's bad, it's not *that* bad. It's not Captain Trips from the Stand. It's like ... our minds aren't good at dealing with population-level threats. There doesn't seem to be a lot of room in our natural emotional reactions between "meh, whatever, it's just the flu" and "oh god if I get it I'm dead."
It's a virus that most people who get it will be fine. Even most people with lots of risk factors will be fine. But some of them won't, and it has the potential to do long-term damage or kill, so when you multiply that "some" out by 10s of millions of people, you get horrible consequences. So try really really hard not to get it, but don't pre-dig your own grave if you do.
You're not going through this alone. We're all in this together.
If herd immunity happens, it will kill millions on its way there. That said - It won't happen. If we never got herd immunity with Measles, COVID ain't doing it. In case you haven't read up on it - Measles is fully airborne, staying infectious in the air hours after the person with it has left. Early symptoms are very similar to a cold or seasonal flu. Anytime there's a vulnerable community, it rips through it like wildfire once exposure happens.
Before the measles vaccine, we never got to herd immunity with Measles - so if we didn't get there with a far more infectious bug, how would we get there with a less infectious one?
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I think the Dakotas and most of the midwest are actively trying to disprove your point. So far, their transmission rates and deaths have been skyrocketing, and their governments and public have done seemingly nothing to slow it down. I've heard some pretty dire things about the shape of the hospital system out there, but I'm not sure where they are quite capacity wise. I wish them the best luck, I really do. They really need to start getting that fear you're talking about, but it might be too late already.
The new part of the mink thing is that it had transitioned back to humans from minks. Was that known already? And it seemed to spread pretty widely among the mink populations there.
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Notre Dame's leadership has demonstrated it doesn't give a fuck. So not a surprise the students didn't either. Shameful there was that big a crowd to start with though.
Things are very very bad. But the only way for them to get worse is for you and people like you to lose hope. Every day you go without catching the virus is good. It's not false to say that there is a slim chance every day that some random drug is found with an incredible off target effect, or even an on target one that is hugely beneficial to this disease.
People here will tell you im an optimist, others in this thread are very pessimistic. But, you have gotten through global respiratory pandemics before. You were alive before 1990, so you faced dozens of flu pandemics with no vaccine. You didn't get sick in every one of them. Don't think that infection is inevitable tomorrow, or that because you didn't get sick yesterday your odds are worse tomorrow. Every day is a new set of odds, and you can make every day strongly in your favor.
Spreading back and forth among animal species is how you get Covid-20+. That can lead to some unpleasant surprises.
This is not ideal
I think you're miscalculating because not all of the 22% of the US that's been infected is *currently* infectious. Only about 1-2% of the US is currently infectious. We can hold out for a vaccine.
This is total back of the napkin stuff, so you could do it different ways and get different numbers. It's just an exercise to show the scale of what we're dealing with.
We've got 10m confirmed cases right now. This is a disease that hides asymptomatically in most people who get it, and we aren't doing nearly enough testing, so there's way more infections than confirmed cases. The CDC in the summer was estimating a 10:1 ratio. If I go conservative and say 7:1, that's about 20-25% of the population already infected.
We are currently adding cases at a 7-day running average of 107,000 per day. If we assume that our testing has gotten *way* better and we're down to a 5:1 ratio (which I don't think we're doing that well, look at how many red states are barely testing at all), that's still 535,000 new infections per day, or 1.14% of the US population this week.
The estimate of the serial interval hasn't changed at about 5 days. A conservative estimate of the current transmission rate in the US is 1.15, so each case yields 1.15 in the next serial interval.
At that transmission rate, 535k new infections per day turns into a million per day by the end of November. At that point, we're adding 2% of the US population per week. And then it doubles again by Christmas.
Will it follow that exact path? I don't know. Ideally, people will notice that the hospitals are filling up really soon and get scared into compliance. And despite the bizarre insistence to the contrary in parts of the internet, the portion of your population that is already infected definitely has a downward pressure on transmission rates, so there will be some slowing as you pile up more. But we've also got all the seasonal upward pressures working against us as the weather drives people indoors and the holidays are coming up. We could just as easily see transmission rates spike even higher as we could see them lower, I honestly don't know.
It feels like we're about to re-learn the lesson in exponential growth that we learned in March. It's gonna get bad *fast* from here. Maybe faster than we can react even if we want to react, and I'm not sure we (as a country) want to react.
Its probably about 330k cases a day as of a week or two ago judging by deaths divided by suspected IFR? Depends on how bad transmission can truly get. Remember that its a very locally spikey disease, it gets super bad in a place, then wanders off somewhere else and gets terrible there. It's not spreading through a neat, well mixed and homogonized population. Even inside local areas you have people being very cautious to the point they are very well protected and can't spread, and people just mingling together like idiots. You're going to get an explosion, followed by cases falling back, followed by people reemerging and mingling, and cases going back up again.
Still, it's important for everyone to remember that whether SOCIETY is doomed to mass infection or not, it doesn't mean you have to be. YOU can take sensible precautions and do a great deal to stay safe.
I want you to know that I'm honestly sorry it feels this way. There's some real bad stuff going down. But when someone feels like doom is completely inevitable, that's usually some dark emotional stuff whispering in their ear and trying to convince them of that. I've been there, it's not easy to deal with.
I'm a big believer that you have to confront the truth in all its forms. So obviously, yeah, it's bad out there. But it's not "certain doom" bad, not even for you. That's also the truth.
First, there's a lot you can do to protect yourself. There will be a portion of the population that holds out until a vaccine, and you can give yourself the best chance to be in that group with your decisions.
Second, it's not certain, but a lot of experts suspect that the amount of virus you are initially infected with could be a strong determiner in how serious your progression is. So even if you *do* get infected, your choices can help you have a better chance of it being mild.
Third, and I do *not* want to downplay this thing because it's bad, it's not *that* bad. It's not Captain Trips from the Stand. It's like ... our minds aren't good at dealing with population-level threats. There doesn't seem to be a lot of room in our natural emotional reactions between "meh, whatever, it's just the flu" and "oh god if I get it I'm dead."
It's a virus that most people who get it will be fine. Even most people with lots of risk factors will be fine. But some of them won't, and it has the potential to do long-term damage or kill, so when you multiply that "some" out by 10s of millions of people, you get horrible consequences. So try really really hard not to get it, but don't pre-dig your own grave if you do.
You're not going through this alone. We're all in this together.
Before the measles vaccine, we never got to herd immunity with Measles - so if we didn't get there with a far more infectious bug, how would we get there with a less infectious one?