Why those people still arguing for herd immunity are wrong. A thread. 1/430

In my county, we just hit 20k known cases, in a population of just shy of 1M. This makes the math work really well. That's a known positive rate of about 2% of the population.

We've also recorded 256 COVID-19 deaths. These lag weeks behind cases, and almost certainly miss a big chunk we don't know about, but let's roll w/ the 250 number for the sake of easy math.

If you want to be really generous to the GBarrington crowd, let's say we miss one case for every one we get (we don't, but let's be generous to the opposition). That leaves about one death per 160 cases, or a CFR of 0.0063

Again, this is bending all the math to best case scenario for the herd immunity crowd. CFR is much more likely to be close to 0.01 (we are busting it with testing, contact tracing, point prevalence testing, etc).

For us to hit herd immunity and disease to start to die out, we'll have to get to over half the population with immunity. So, we are about 460k cases away.

That's close to 3K more deaths, even at the lowest conceivable CFR estimate. Likely, we're closer to 5K. At that point, county population will have dropped by .5%.

This is assuming those cases don't flood and break the hospitals and LTC facilities, which they likely would. In that case, CFR shoots upward.

Oh, and more bad news? This month, there is starting to be more signal from the noise hinting at reinfection of people who got sick in March/April, so we can't be convinced herd immunity would ever be a thing.

Over the next six months, we have to choose as a country between a high vaccination rate or continuing outbreaks. That means lockdowns, it means the burden of testing costs, it means bloated health dept budgets, etc

Just get yer damn jabs, knuckleheads. Yeah, we are all taking some risk here. I'll go first if you'll go next.