Quote:
Originally Posted by AustinChief
This brings up an interesting point... how many people in the US have been infected?
The CDC estimated that there were 6-24 times as many infections compared to the confirmed numbers.
Let's play with those numbers for a sec... if we split the difference between 6x and 24x that gives us 15x but that's obviously too high so let's be conservative and go with 10x. The US currently is reporting 17.5 million confirmed cases. If the actual number is 10 times that than we have had 175 million infections so far. If Covid has a herd immunity threshold of 80% than you are looking at 65 million more cases to reach that level. (30 days at our current rate of infection).
Even if you go with their 6x figure... you have 17.5M x 6 = 105M which puts us at 80% in roughly 3 months. Does that seem accurate to most of you? If not, where is the problem? Do we have had a TON of false positives that are being included in the data or is the CDC is way off base regarding unreported cases and that number is more like 2x not 6x?
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I wish we knew. I think all we can say definitively at this point is that no one has been able to get to the point that cases are naturally declining due to previous infections resulting in something resembling herd immunity. Otherwise, we shouldn't be seeing spikes in places like NYC, Louisiana, etc. who were in such rough shape early on.
It's possible that the antibody studies were detecting low levels that didn't actually grant immunity or something like that.