That makes sense. Too bad the story in the news was making such an unfair comparison. But, you know, there's no news like bad news.
Fauci made an optimistic statement about the possibility of having a working vaccine in the 1Q21 and possibly general availability by the summer which is good.
Another big change- typically publicly-traded companies typically won't invest in manufacturing a vaccine or medication until it is well into human subject trials and double-blind studies. With this vaccine, some of the companies have expressed an interest in investing in manufacturing early which will speed up the availability of a vaccine to general public.
1) Well, do hospitals have "business interests"? Do food suppliers? Governments that rely on tax revenue to supply social safety networks? Do communications, transportation networks, energy grids, defense, natural resources, etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc, have "business interests"? I'm constantly amazed that people think "business interests" are somehow not totally interwoven with even the most basic elements of our social system from the top to the bottom, that "business interests" are just those of rich assholes on Wall Street. I don't think this is really about politics, but about the reality of having a system that survives just to structure the simplest elements of our society. What I find myself wondering is how even these simplest elements would survive 18 months of near-failure. And if they survived, then where would we be? (I need to start a thread on war.)
Hospitals have an interest in protecting their employees- 10,000 of whom have have contracted COVID-19 in the US. They also have an interest in profitability and until they reduce the number of unreimbursed COVID-19 patients in their facilities, they won't be able to resume the profitable outpatient services that they have had to defer during the crisis.
The job market has been segmented into three groups of people - the employees who are essential workers who must work at their workplaces, the non-essential employees who can work from home and the furloughed workers whose employers cannot afford to pay them.
The polls are saying that a majority of Americans don't feel secure enough to go to places with crowds. They are worried about sending their children to school. They are worried about lessening of the restrictions too early. And in all these instances, when asked about the financial impacts, they're choosing their health over their financial risk.
Germany is one country that has reduced their rate of replication (R[sub]0[/sub]) to less than 1 which means that the number of cases is decreasing as fewer people have been passing along the virus. But here's a breakdown for Germany's new cases for the past 10 days.
20-Apr 1,964
21-Apr 1,322
22-Apr 1,388
23-Apr 2,276
24-Apr 2,664
25-Apr 1,661
26-Apr 1,673
27-Apr 1,054
28-Apr 977
29-Apr 1,721
30-Apr 1,060
Now that they've been backing off on some of their restrictions, the numbers are increasing. Even with measures in effect and an R[sub]0[/sub] less than 1, they are still getting over 1,000 new cases per day. Germany has 161,539 cases.
The US has 1,040,488 cases with 25,000 new cases per day and the
US' cases are increasing at 4 times the rate of Germany's. Guess what is going to happen in the US?
2) The virus is already working its way through the population. I don't think that can be stopped. If I understand correctly, our goal is to slow transmission, not to end transmission. The Swedes are merely slowing transmission in a less repressive manner; but it's not true that they are NOT trying to slow transmission.
No, the goal is always containment and elimination. The opportunity to do that was in February. America blew that opportunity, so now we're in mitigation and reduction, trying desperately to get that R[sub]0[/sub] under 1 so that we don't have 25,000 new cases every day.
The Swedes are not doing much of anything for people under 60. They have a 25% infection rate and claim that their goal is not herd immunity (which makes no sense to most epidemiologists).
3) If we have 30-50% exposure in 18 months, that's a good thing for herd immunity, isn't it?
SARS-CoV-2 will require >70-80% immunity to attain "herd immunity", assuming that there is a persistence of immunity beyond 24 months past recovery. At a 30% rate of infection, you'll have about 60 million adults who are infected. If you assume a mortality of 3%, that's 1.8 million dead. Does that sound like a good idea?
