New York State has completed 15 000 randomized antibody tests.
12.3% came back positive. 12.3% of the population is 2.4 million. There have been 24 000 reported deaths. That makes a death rate of 1% though the CDC thinks the real death rate is likely 36 000 so maybe up to 1.5%.
I think that is about where people thought it would be. Then consider that overwhelming the healthcare system would result in a much higher death rate both of COVID 19 and other illnesses and we can see the disaster of the 'let it burn' strategy.
50-70% of the population needs to be immune for herd immunity if I remember correctly so they still have a far way to go (and we don't actually know what sort of immunity being exposed will provide).
57% of people surveyed were white and 7% of them came back with a positive test. That means that white people in New York State are contracting the virus at half the rate of non-white people.
So that's important to look into.
So NYC is ~20% infected. And we are undercounting Covid-19 deaths by about 1/3 (so 50% more die than the official stats). (NYC deaths * 1.5) / (NYC population * .2) is 1.2%.
Similar numbers show up in parts of Italy where they think almost everyone was infected -- about 1% death rate.
If herd immunity is at around 50% infected, that is 330 million / 2 * 1% or 1.65 million dead Americans. Of which about a million actually get diagnosted with Covid-19.
At a lifecycle of 7 days and an R0 of 2, going from 1 million active infected to 165 million infected takes about two months. Herd immunity is mostly zilch until you hit double-digit percents infected, so we can neglect that.
Herd immunity stops the disease from accelerating at around 1/(R0-1) immune. But it only causes the disease spread to seriously shrink at around twice that.
Get R0 down to 1.2 and have 50% immune and you end up with 0.6, or each active case spreads to another 1.5 people; you'll note that if 25% of the population are actively infected at that point, that means the virus grows to about 80% infected (50%+25%*1.5) even though it is "stopped"; if your disease was growing super-fast as you approach 50% immune, herd immunity isn't usually enough to stop it; but if there are people who are avoiding infection, they get infected less, and herd immunity can make the more exposed people stop feeding it.
So a herd immunity plan is to make it spread, and when about the millionths US citizen dies you have hit about 33% infected. At
that point, restart some measures, this time boosted by herd immunity. Dead keep piling up and approach 2 million, but decelerate as (a) piles of corpses make people take social distancing more seriously, (b) herd immunity makes half-assed measures more effective, as front-line workers get culled earlier.
And plenty of jobs for mass-grave diggers. Got a backhoe license?
