The numbers of how many people are willing to get vaccinated are all over the place with your number by far the lowest, many other papers are more in the 50-75%.
I hope you’re right. I didn’t make up the number, though. I read it somewhere a few weeks ago and rounded upwards a bit to 40%. A higher inoculation rate would obviously help a lot.
I also read a recent estimate (based on a theoretical model and lots of assumptions) that herd immunity would be reached at only 43%, which is very much lower than others have been saying.
Both of these would be good news if true.
If you remember where you read that number, maybe never read anything on that site again.
Surely many people who don’t bother to get a seasonal flu shot will want to be vaccinated against Covid-19 since it’s a lot more likely to kill them.
The percentage required for herd immunity depends on the basic reproduction number (R0), which is a range rather than a static value. 1 - 1 / R0 = percentage of immunity required for herd immunity.
Based on the behavior of the general “anti-vaccination, anti-mask, anti-social-distancing/don’t tell me what to do” individuals, I think that’s a dangerous assumption.
While I well and truly hope a large majority will get the vaccination (whenever it is available), I think there will need to be a concerted, multi-front outreach and education effort (government, in-person, community, social media, etc.) in tandem, else a frightening percentage may choose not to.
This paragraph in the Guardian’s “Melbourne” article that you posted really got my attention. It was in reference to America and it was like I’d been punched in the gut:
“The country is at a critical crossroads. Science and reason are in a battle to be heard and to try to drive public policy in the middle of a pandemic. At the same time, the US is in the midst of a historic reckoning with centuries of racial injustice – even as the White House stokes division along racial lines. Meanwhile the pandemic has exposed the painful inequities underlying American life. The coming months will determine whether they might finally be addressed.”
Such painful truth.
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I got the 43% number from the Science article that I posted, above. Here’s the abstract:
“Despite various levels of preventive measures, in 2020 many countries have suffered severely from the coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) virus. We show that population heterogeneity can significantly impact disease-induced immunity as the proportion infected in groups with the highest contact rates is greater than in groups with low contact rates. We estimate that if R 0 = 2.5 in an age-structured community with mixing rates fitted to social activity then the disease-induced herd immunity level can be around 43%, which is substantially less than the classical herd immunity level of 60% obtained through homogeneous immunization of the population. Our estimates should be interpreted as an illustration of how population heterogeneity affects herd immunity, rather than an exact value or even a best estimate.”
I don’t recall where I saw the 37% estimate of the number of people that will get vaccinated, but I too was surprised. I would have thought it would be more like the number of people who get the flu shot, which is around 50%. I haven’t seen any other estimates of this kind. But I hope you’re right.
Meanwhile, I also hope for an early arrival of a treatment. The truly best possible scenario (no facetiousness or sarcasm here) would be for a medication or procedure that enables almost every severe case to recover; basically zero or near-zero people actually dying, just some still getting sick to various degrees. And then a vaccine with high effectiveness.
I thought that the note on the piano that you’ve constantly been beating on was deaths. And of course I agree. Who doesn’t? It really doesn’t need to be yelled out over and over.
Bringing the number of deaths down to near zero is the objective. Who cares about the number of cases, outside of that contex (the context of deaths)? Do we really care that there were about 40,000,000 cases of flu this past flu season in the US? Getting sick is no fun, but in the end the main thing is that no one – not you, not me, not anyone – wanted any of the 40,000 flu deaths over-winter from the flu. At least we have a vaccine and a medication of some effectiveness for the flu, or the number of deaths from the it every year would be much higher.
Sweden really screwed up at the beginning by not protecting the vulnerable elderly, especially in care homes. No argument there. But I’ve been interested in following what’s going on there because their approach is radically different than elsewhere. Which approach was best will only be visible on hindsight. It’s way too early to condemn and dismiss any one approach, IMO.
And I never said anything approaching “the trend looks great” in the US.
Right, “if R0 = 2.5.”
Long-term, of course, but currently the goal is to avoid (or in some areas to stop) overwhelming hospitals.
Absolutely. Which is why I believe (and have said before) that huge amounts of money should have been and should now be poured into increasing both permanent and temporary hospital capacity.
In SD County, the total number of hospital beds in use for all causes has slowly gone up from just under 4000 to just over. (Of those, the number of beds in use by covid patients has gone up a little, but it’s still under 500.) We have 6000 beds in SD County, so right now there’s still a lot of headroom here. That’s no reason to yawn and be complacent, IMO. We still should be increasing total capacity, so that if the headroom goes down further, we won’t be caught off guard. We can still avoid overwhelming the medical system. As in “there’s still time, brother”.
Interesting. I’ll quote the main conclusion of that article here:
“According to the results of the random-effects model, the pooled R0 for COVID-19 was estimated as 3.32 (95% confidence interval, 2.81 to 3.82)”
Covid-19’s R0 can’t be usefully reduced like that. People living in crowded homes and dependent on public transportation infect more people. The herd immunity percentage will vary accordingly.
In many places in the US, hospital capacity is limited not by beds but by personnel.
I think that’s why the addition of heterogeneity in terms of contact is important in these models.
Point taken. It’s not clear how to rapidly increase hospital staffing. The knee-jerk analogy (if you will) between moving firefighters to areas where large brushfires are taking place comes to mind, though. A lot of medical people did go to the aid of NY, I believe – without a quantitative basis.
Medical personnel can travel and patients can be moved (luckily for Imperial County and Texas), but that can take up only so much slack.
SD County has been the stop-gap for Imperial County. Many of their hospitalizations have been transferred to San Diego. As of yesterday SD is back on the State watch list. I would imagine the flow of patients from Imperial to San Diego will be scaled back.
Orchestrated movement of medical personnel should also be part of a broad, coordinated national plan to fight against deaths from covid, then. It’s amazing what the Army Corps of Engineers can do in terms of rapidly building temporary structures.
I hope schools and employers will require covid19 vaccine shots once they are available for those who want to work and have their kids at school. In addition, restaurants should be required to post if every employee had the vaccine shot - all of these would drive up the numbers fast if mandatory.
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There are only two realistic chances - repurposing of existing drugs and antibodies. Repurposing has delivered so far two drugs with limited (but some) effect but it is hard to see how any other drug found now will have suddenly a breakthrough effect as so many screens were already done over the last few months.
Antibodies have a reasonable chance of having a significant impact on the disease in the short term but the problems with antibodies in the US healthcare system is that they tend to be much more expensive than small molecule drugs and so many in the US won’t be able to afford it. Any new small molecule drugs will take 3-4 years (at least) to the market.