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Comment by Leary | Hacker News Reader

There's no reason why 40-70% of people will inevitably get infected. California daily new cases already plateued

Reported new cases will be flat at the capacity they can perform tests. You need to look at death rate (change) to get better idea.

California cases are plateaued due to a lack of testing capacity, I would be hesitant to suggest that the growth has stopped.

I think that number might be coming from the idea that at that level of infection you'd get herd immunity - i.e. this thing is going to keep going around until we hit herd immunity.

Reaching herd immunity level is a possibility but not inevitable

Agree it's not inevitable, but seems plausibly to be the highest probability path at this point.

With the current tools we have, it seems inevitable to me. Look at china or hong kong... lockdown led to getting local infections under control, which leads to an easing of restrictions, which lead to new infections from outside of the region. So by that logic, life doesn't get to go back to "normal" until either herd immunity is reached, or new tools come online.

That assumes that this virus doesn't mutate quickly, mitigating the effectiveness of herd immunity and vaccination.

Totally true. Obviously nobody knows right now if that will happen or not, but that question was posed on a recent episode of This Week in Virology (great podcast, btw) and they seemed to be saying that the mutated seasonal variant is a fairly unique characteristic of the flu virus, and it would not be _likely_ to happen with COVID-19.

True, but that seem to be a reasonable assumption according to at least some virologists looking at it.

There are so many unknowns right now that any modeling is going to have issues, best you can do is state your assumptions clearly, and explore the ones that seem most likely in some depth. Otherwise you just end up with an ensemble of models that could result if nearly anything.

The thinking behind that is that short of having a vaccine (18 mo off at best, probably) we are simply not capable of containing it, just slowing it down. Once you you somewhere in that 40-70% range, it self contains due to lack of available hosts.

Talking to people who study this stuff for a living, it's not an unreasonable assumption at this point.

Plateauing during stringent isolation (if that is the case) isn't' evidence against this, I think.

The big problem is that there still are not anything like good population estimates in the US, and unlikely to be since serious testing isn't done. Death and hospitalization statistics are better (but can get inaccurate if systems are overwhelmed) so the best the modelers can do is try and project from countries with better data ... inherently this is not as good as having good local data.

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