Posts

Comments

Comment by ProkhorZakharov on April Coronavirus Open Thread · 2020-04-08T00:16:03.378Z · LW · GW

Hi,

I need your input on something. Sweden, as many of you know they are going for the herd immunity. Choosing to walk an unorthodox way.

They are still only reporting around ten thousand cases but with a death toll of 600 and rising. Probably the true number of infections is around 40k-100k depending on what mortality/asymptomatic cases we assume. The current rate, as in the number of hospitalizations per day is still within the the limits. It could probably go as high as double the death rate, before breaching the limit.

To reach heard immunity they need 60% of population (10 million) immune I'm told, with the other important goal of not breaching the capacity of the healthcare system.

With some calculations we could land on the maximum rate of infections of say 10k per day, before our healthcare starts to break apart. The exact figure is not important, the approximate magnitude is. With 10k infections per rate, Sweden would need 600 days to develop her immunity.

Recently some info from Denmark has indicated 27/1000 blood donors have tested positive for antibodies in one population and 0/244 in an other. I can share the source (Danish) unfortunately not much details on type of test or other information. But this has me wondering if you sit on any information of corona virus test false positives. cellax seems to.be around 1.5-3%

In case herd immunity, is the way to go having potentially tens of thousands of asymptomatic cases is great news as a tenfold increase in actual infections coupled with the current death rates will give Sweden a time to herd immunity of only a few months.

Of course percentage required would go up as R0 in that case is a little higher than what we initially thought.

From what I've read from other studies this is unlikely and herd immunity is as far away as the (winter) Olympics.

Anyways what are your thoughts? do you happen to sit on some data on false positive rates for various tests?