Shanghai Disneyland will close in effort to contain coronavirus

What I understand about herd immunity is that it works because with a high percentage of people with immunity, there is simply a lot less chance for infections. Its important even if vaccines are available because not everyone can have the vaccine (beyond the anti-vax crowd there are people with legitimate reasons for not getting certain vaccines). In addition, not everyone has the same immune response to vaccines. Often times its the elderly (unfortunately in this case) that have weaker immune responses in large part because they have weaker immune systems (and that isn't because of underlying conditions as much as it is a 25 year old will have a stronger/better immune system than a 75 year old). Some people who get vaccines will have strong reactions to it. From what I understand that is a good sign because it means there is a strong immune response. The herd immunity helps in those instances for those who got a vaccine and thus have some immunity but not necessarily a high level.

I think the total lockdown approach of China could work hypothetically still in the US. More problematic in the hot spot areas though I think it could still work (but those lockdown measures were extreme). But for a number of reasons that would never happen here.

Although maybe not quite as Draconian as China, New Zealand did do a pretty hard lock-down. They completely closed their borders and from what I can piece together they closed all commerce except for groceries, pharmacies, hospitals, and gas stations.

I don't disagree that this stopped the virus in their country. I do wonder if we would have been as successful if we had implemented the same strategy from the beginning. It seems like we were just starting to turn the corner with our soft lockdown when we began to open back up. So, maybe it would have worked for us.

US soft lockdown wasn't going to wipe out the virus in the US in the 4 week time period that worked in New Zealand. US shutdown would have to have been much longer (some indefinite amount of time) or much more strict to produce the results of New Zealand. Effectively shutting down the world's largest economy is a much different venture than shutting down one the size of Metro Denver. Shutting down more than 5,000 miles of land border and thousands of miles of coastline is very much different than shutting down an island nation. But if you could shut down the US borders to the same effect New Zealand did and lock down business to the same levels as New Zealand did for the length of time New Zealand did, seems likely it would have worked in the US. Benefit of their approach with that level of lock down is that testing is less important (at least at the beginning) and testing has been and continues to be very problematic in the US.

I don't think the US' lockdown was ever intended to wipe out the virus. The lockdown was a blunt force measure intended to slow the spread while we ramped up our efforts at containment - testing, tracing, isolation, etc. - before the spread got out of hand. This was necessary in large part because the US' was woefully unprepared even back in January, and did little between January and March to make up for it.

So we had to play a whole lot of catch-up. Unfortunately, we failed at that too. Testing is still completely inadequate in most states, and cases are increasing rapidly. And that was before the holiday weekend.

And while it's too early to put too much stock in the number of deaths over two days, we did just have our highest number of deaths over two days since early June.

I noticed that too and deaths in FL, AZ, and TX are definitely on a steady upward trend, BUT that spike in the last two days is also right after a holiday weekend. You'll notice the valley is 3 days wide instead of 2 days wide so similar to Memorial Day, there's a backlog of deaths to record. We'll see in a few days if it's just an artifact of recording or an actual increase in deaths.

That's why you should look at the 7-day rolling average, which is definitely on the rise in the "spike" states. It normalizes the gaps in reporting.

Yeah, it's entirely possible that the holiday weekend contributed to those big days, but at the same time the 7 day average is up about 6% nationally. Not huge, but certainly not the trend we want. Hopefully it bends the other way.

On the other hand, we have a lot of active cases right now. And more hospitalizations than at any time since mid-May. Hopefully that's mostly explainable by increased testing, which is up ~75% since then.

Increased cases being caused (at least in part) by increased testing makes sense. Earlier you had to be in risk group and showing symptoms to get tested; now those requirements have been largely relaxed. So people who were getting the virus but having resolve with little to no issues/problems were not getting tested so we didn't officially identify them.

Increased hospitalizations due to more testing is tougher to justify I think. Unless there are people who we are now admitting to hospitals for treatment before the illness gets bad and in the past we let them ride it out at home (and the case wouldn't have gotten bad enough for hospital but treatments improve resolution). Could be some of that but presumably increased hospitalization are also the result of increased spread.

djDaemon said:

And more hospitalizations than at any time since mid-May. Hopefully that's mostly explainable by increased testing, which is up ~75% since then.

There aren't more people in hospitals because there is more testing. There are more people in hospitals because more people are that sick.

Right, "mostly" was the wrong word. "Partially" is what I should have said. I think it's reasonable to conclude that some hospitalizations can be explained by increased testing, if only because, as GoBucks mentioned, we may be admitting people earlier than we would have back in May, when testing was more focused on more obvious cases.

And this hopefully leads to lower fatality, since treating early presumably leads to better outcomes. But even if that's true, we still have so many cases that it would not be surprising to see ~1,000 deaths per day in the near future.

I’m sure nobody needs me to point this out, but the real, not-caused-by-holiday-weekend death counts are clearly beginning to track the increase in cases. So I’m once again beginning to doubt the feasibility of “insulating the high risk from the low risk” as a long term strategy.

Of course it's not a strategy... you can't really be sure about your risk until you get it and either die or survive it. When younger people get it and die with no apparent comorbidity, all you can do is shrug. You can't just create two classes of citizens either. Clearly that hasn't been working for the last 300 years, and we shouldn't try it in a new way either.

Brian Noble said:

djDaemon said:

And more hospitalizations than at any time since mid-May. Hopefully that's mostly explainable by increased testing, which is up ~75% since then.

There aren't more people in hospitals because there is more testing. There are more people in hospitals because more people are that sick.

I just spent 20 minutes trying to explain to someone why lower death "rates" are nothing to get excited about.

I mean, I'm a frickin' teacher and I still couldn't break through. It was like being that sperm that just can't break through the egg. You can bash your head all you want, but some **** just isn't getting in.

Jeff said:

Of course it's not a strategy.

If I understood correctly, it was a large part of Gonch's strategy.

Ouch - low blow.

?
I'm not trying to be a d*ck or anything. He proposed a possible approach. I considered it because it seemed plausible. The data backed it up for a while. The data is now beginning to undermine it.

Come on, Andy...we all know you have a long history of being a complete d*ck on this site.

I might be a d*ck, but I’m not the one who invoked a sperm analogy.

Every sperm is sacred.

Every sperm is great.

When a sperm is wasted....