Saturday, August 01, 2020

Herd Immunity


Is herd immunity the only real solution to the increasing infection rate of the COVID-19 pandemic? Well many epideniologists think so ... and I am beginning to agree. The current hot spots in the USA are Florida, Texas and California ... replacing New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts, all three of which might be approaching some sort of plateau in daily new cases ... each generating only a few hundred cases per day while the hot spots are in the thousands. (There are other states that could be placed in each group ... only to complicate things ... so we will ignore them here.)

To normalize things between these states we will look at new daily cases per million of population ... see: World Meters. Here they are today:

                                Total
                     Cases per 1 million
New York               22,843

New Jersey             21,128

Massachusetts       17,064

Florida                    22,350

Texas                      15,315

California               12,799

Total USA              14,351

As been demonstrated in various blood tests for this virus’ antibodies, the number of asymptomatic cases can be as much as twenty or more times diagnoses cases. Therefore we can see from the above that New York, New Jersey and Florida might really have as many as 400,000 cases per million (40%) of population. Now, herd immunity is estimated to be achieved at 50-60% ... so, we might be getting close to herd immunity in these three states. (Maybe why these states, excepting the special case Florida might be slowing down.) And Texas, California and Massachusetts still have a way to go ... as does the overall USA. (Caveat: our much more extensive testing now might have reduced this multiplier between asymptomatic and diagnosed cases to well below 20.)

(We are not dealing with coronavirus death rates here because therapeutics have gotten a whole lot better ... and we have also learned to concentrate mitigation efforts on nursing homes. Texas, California and Florida are still doing worlds better than the other three on this count.)

STAND UP FOR AMERICA!

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