ok, so we're starting to see the kinds of numbers, now, that we were hoping to see at the end of april, it's just taken a little longer.

new york was hit first, so you're looking at what? 5-6 months to get to herd immunity?

we also saw transmission flatten enough to allow for a manageable case load at around 20-30%, although my error analysis suggested the true prevalence of antibodies may have been much higher than reported. subsequent testing on these antibody tests have in fact indicated that they tend to produce more false negatives than false positives, so i had the right line of thinking. but, the point i'm making is that merely having a moderate level of immunity actually seems to have slowed this virus down a lot, meaning it's probably only that initial couple of weeks where immunity is at near zero that hospitals needs to seriously concern themselves about reaching capacity. distancing aside, 20% immunity seems to be putting enough of a dent in transmission to make it manageable...

so, that's just what's happening in the south right now - the virus is running through a population with almost no immunity. this is the first wave. it may take a long time to burn itself out, but it should slow down considerably when immunity gets to around 20%.

up here in canada, it's harder to tell if we've been slowly and quietly inching towards those initial ramp down numbers, or if we managed to actually stop it at a lower rate of precedence through public health measures. you know what i think, but we don't actually know. there's some randomized bloodbank tests underway that should give a better picture...and this will help us understand how vulnerable we remain...

you have to understand that my position from the start of this is that herd immunity isn't a policy decision, it's an inevitable reality. we can't decide to have herd immunity or not; we will have it, whether we like it or not. so, i'm quite adamantly avoiding this idea of needing to take this position that one thing is more important than the other; i'm rather arguing that the public health measures are only going to, at most, slow it down - at great cost.

is new york the first place to actually measure this? are they first to the end of this? they won't be the last - this is going to be reality in most places in the world, in a year, while the anti-immunity idiots sit around waiting for a vaccine.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/10/health/queens-antibody-testing-coronavirus/index.html