The evolving science of herd immunity from coronaplague

Back in March, the best scientists, including one with a Ph.D. in physics who happens to run Germany (see “60% to 70% of the German population will be infected by the coronavirus, Merkel says”) believed that the majority of a population would have to become infected with coronaplague before herd immunity would would kick in.

“The progress of the COVID-19 epidemic in Sweden: an analysis” does a region-by-region analysis of Sweden, in which plague mitigation efforts among the non-elderly have been minimal, and concludes that when 6 percent test positive for antibodies, herd immunity may be reached among a population that is taking only voluntary precautions:

Notwithstanding that a month ago antibodies were only detected in 6.3% of the Swedish population, the declining death rate since mid-May strongly suggests that the herd immunity threshold had been surpassed in the three largest regions, and in Sweden as a whole, by the end of April. … The herd immunity threshold is likely lower at present than it would be if people were behaving completely normally; it may also be seasonally lower.

Here’s a June 30 article from Quanta, “The Tricky Math of Herd Immunity for COVID-19”:

But on a larger scale, heterogeneity typically lowers the herd immunity threshold. At first the virus infects people who are more susceptible and spreads quickly. But to keep spreading, the virus has to move on to people who are less susceptible. This makes it harder for the virus to spread, so the epidemic grows more slowly than you might have anticipated based on its initial rate of growth.

The above paragraph could have come from a 100-year-old epidemiology text. Thus, it is a example of one of the few bright spots in my coronaplague experience, i.e., seeing how Americans pitch the near-universal failure of “scientists” (except for the MD/PhDs who work for the Swedish government) to predict the likely trajectory and death rate of the epidemic as a success for “science”: Yes, we got everything wrong by a factor of 5-40X, but that just proves how quickly progress can be made in Science with sufficient funding and the right leadership in the White House.

Now that the plague has run its course (for at least Wave #1) here in Maskachusetts, my Facebook feed is packed with people congratulating themselves:

Tremendous achievement in Massachusetts. Not easy. And not free of tremendous costs. But it works and is saving lives ! [over “Mass. Reports 0 New Coronavirus Deaths — and Its Death Toll Drops in Data Cleanup”, regarding a day in which state workers apparently decided to take a mini vacation and not report any deaths]

(A self-proclaimed “data scientist” also posted this as evidence of a grand achievement. The next day, at which point the reported deaths were back to the trend, I ingenuously asked “What happened today? Were there zero deaths again?” He defriended me, thus contributing to my effort to be the most defriended person in the history of Facebook.)

Some data: the July 2 report from MA, population 7 million, with 51 reported deaths. From Texas, population 29 million, 44 reported deaths for the same day:

Florida, population 21 million, suffered 67 deaths on July 2, according to the failing New York Times:

So my friends here in Maskachusetts were celebrating the triumph of humans over a virus despite a death rate vastly higher than the states they explicitly describe as “disasters” and a death rate vastly higher than Belarus, for example, which did not bother to shut down schools, mass gatherings, or anything else. It is a little strange to me, since every year the influenza epidemic winds down and we don’t, every year, celebrate our success in making influenza go away. Example from the CDC of human triumph over the influenza virus:

The smart American humans wiped this virus out back in 2009 (thanks to excellent leadership from President Obama?)!

I wonder if the Facebook and media celebration of a zero-death data anomaly in Maskachusetts is a guide to how Americans will process their months (or years?) of shutdown when coronaplague does finally burn itself out. They will simply assert that the sacrifices that they made prevented the virus from killing millions of people, just as the Flagellants believed that they ended the Black Death. And then there will be a twist in which people will assert that things being taught in epidemiology skool back in the 1800s (e.g., Farr’s law) were newly discovered by heroic “scientists” in mid-2020.

7 thoughts on “The evolving science of herd immunity from coronaplague

  1. I’m pretty sure I caught the flu in early 2017, so I’m not sure President Obama succeeded in making it go away in 2009. I can recall at least two other times I’d previously gotten it, so I’m also not sure how well herd immunity is working out.

  2. > He defriended me, thus contributing to my effort to be the most defriended person in the history of Facebook.

    I think it’s clear that you’ve mastered the science of being defriended on Facebook. And Nicholas Lewis does a great job with that paper. It’s too bad some of your -ex friends in Massachusetts will never read it.

    >a death rate vastly higher than Belarus, for example, which did not bother to shut down schools, mass gatherings, or anything else.

    How did Belarus do so well? What kind of demographic miracle did they have? Massachusetts: 7 million people and 9,422 deaths by October 1 (.0013557) Belarus: 9.5 million people and 873 deaths by October 1. (.0000918)

    https://covid19-projections.com/belarus

    The government of Belarus told the virus to GO AWAY!

    I’m surprised by Poland. https://covid19-projections.com/poland True, they locked down (now mostly reopen) and closed schools until June 7, and look at their results: 38 million people and 2,986 deaths projected by October 1. (.0000785) – better than Belarus and their “drink vodka in the fields!” leader, better than Sweden (.000617) by almost an order of magnitude, and Poland makes Massachusetts (.0013557) look like an apocalyptic wasteland of contagion by comparison. Massachusetts will have more than 17 times as many dead people by total population than Poland on October 1.

    https://www.emsworld.com/article/1224413/how-poland-protects-against-covid-19-coronavirus

    “The historical fear of plagues in Poland is evident even in old religious songs and rituals intended to ward off the infected air. The demon thought responsible for such epidemics in pre-Slavic times was Trzybka. In the Middle Ages it was believed they came from God’s wrath, the influence of planets, or the appearance of comets.”

    In fact, I wonder if their low numbers are actually bad news: Can Poland ever achieve herd immunity? It looks like they’ve done such a good job containing the virus; only 2.3% of the population will have been infected by October 1.

  3. It is not a given that the same virus is circulating in different countries.

    There was recently a discovery that the strain in the US has a mutation that
    may contribute to being more contagious. The article below claims 10x transmission rate over what the Asian countries were seeing.

    It’s not even likely that the same
    strain is in all parts of Europe. With tens of millions of hosts, and imperfect replication, each day there are more people who catch it, and correspondingly more chances for a mutation that changes the transmission rate or lethality. And as for the less transmissible strains, well, evolution and all that… what we get left with is the more transmissible ones, and possibly more dangerous as well, if their replication is more efficient.

    https://www.biospace.com/article/mutated-covid-19-viral-strain-in-us-and-europe-much-more-contagious/

  4. All smarty-pants attitudes aside, we have witnessed a jump in death rates, chiefly in New England and the Mid-Atlantic States. Deaths have been overwhelmingly concentrated in the old. This is significant and historically noteworthy.

    Whether the lockdown was helpful in mitigating deaths is a hypothetical — the spike in deaths is not. Rather than asking how effective the lockdown was in stopping further deaths, the question should be what caused the death rates to spike where and when it did?

    My gut tells me that our health care system has become very brittle — the flooding of money into the system has turned it away from something seeking to make people healthier and fight disease and towards a system most interested in snatching as many dollars as possible. This did not happen overnight, it is a trend going back decades. The Coronavirus was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

    Breakdowns in civil order across the country, centered in urban centers, is another worthy subject of examination. I think the two are related in cause — massive welfare spending undermined more organic, non-market social and health-related controls.

    Why did Swedes hospitalize so few of their oldsters? Because they accept that death at a very old age is natural and *healthy* in a broader context. This attitude is symptomatic of a more humane health care system that has proper priorities — that is why they did better than Massachusetts.

    But I am repeating what I said in other past comments. heh.

    The important question is not whether lockdown was effective. The important question is why did deaths spike when and where they did.

  5. Voters are so foolish. You might think that voters in high tax states would hold their officials accountable for under performing the no income tax states. You would think voters in high tax states like NY (collects $40 bil in income tax alone) would be outraged by how much their state government charges them to live in the state and how dismally their state government performs on the things that matter — health, safety and education. Should one even hope that the voters in high tax states would wonder where their tax dollars go — with the schools closed, no Zoom in NYC, dismal health statistics and criminals rioting while the police stand around & note that according to the Manhattan Institute the average NYC policeman is paid a total of $195,000 annually once you include “benefits,” i.e. pensions and health care that no one in the private sector will receive.

    • The only middle class jobs in New York that are left are either public servant jobs like cops or teachers, or heavily dependent on public financing, like healthcare.

      Then factor in all the welfare recipients, many of whom are the working poor.

      New York’s economy is built on graft, fraud and welfare dependency.

      The inefficiency and ineffectiveness is not a bug, it is a feature. The worse things get, the more money gets poured in to make the problems worse.

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