bearister said:
SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) -- It's a story that has been making headlines across the United States, did Californians develop herd immunity after possibly being exposed to novel coronavirus last year?
https://abc7news.com/health/coronavirus-herd-immunity-in-california-doctor-shares-his-thoughts/6093881/
bearister, I know you love this theory. I suspect because it would be such an easy solution if we just all had it. I would point out that if you really read this, the doctor basically tactfully said, "yeah, we should look into that, but...no."
Quote:
So I would believe that local public health experts in positions still would have been saying like hey we're having a lot of people hospitalized for something, and none of our tests are coming back positive and so that never came up. Now it's possible in the past somebody may have died and they would have said you know this is pneumonia or respiratory failure, and they weren't exactly calling it COVID-19. But again, if we say that 50 to 60% need to be infected at herd immunity. That's hard for me to believe right now in the United States
I'm sorry, but the simplest explanation is the most likely. And, also, the simplest explanation also explains why Washington has been impacted to such a lesser extent as well. What is more likely?
Scenario 1: The Bay Area took drastic action before anyone else did. The rest of California followed suit a couple days later. Washington also took drastic action. All three took action very early on their curve with very few cases. The places where the spread has been slowed happen to correspond where they took the earliest, most drastic action.
Scenario 2: California got COVID first. 50%-60% of the population were infected giving us herd immunity. Somehow with half of us getting it, it did not overwhelm our hospitals. We were not looking at 1000's of deaths. Or we were and nobody noticed it. With UCSF and Stanford, and the major Kaiser hub right here, the medical community that decades before very early recognized a strange "cancer" or "pneumonia" in the gay community with a handful of cases completely missed this one. And somehow with many nonstop flights to New York every day, and on average half of those on those flights infected, NONE of us took the virus to New York so they could get herd immunity or start their outbreak months earlier. None of us took the virus to the myriad of US cities that thousands fly to every day. We didn't take it to Chicago or Boston or Detroit or New Orleans. But half of us were infected massively early by an outbreak taking place in a city that has very little travel to and from California. And because of that we already reached our apex with no one noticing and the virus is running on fumes here?
It plain doesn't make sense. Somehow you have to explain why we did not see the hospitalizations and deaths that everyone else who has seen a major presence of the virus has had. Because, again, for us to have heard immunity, half of us would have had to get it while not overwhelming the medical apparatus. Honestly, a very unlikely, completely unsupported, but much better theory, would be that the virus has been circulating around California in some earlier form for more like years, not months, in a form that looked like normal flu with normal flu death rates, that took its time infecting most of us, and then somewhere in the world mutated enough to become deadlier but not enough that our antibodies did not recognize the virus. If California has herd immunity on this thing, we did not get it from Wuhan. They got it from us.
What makes more sense is it is a politically motivated theory with no scientific basis that has been making the rounds in conservative institutions and media because they 1. Want to believe we should never have adopted social distancing and 2. never want to give liberal California credit for anything.
