Some somewhat optimistic speculation about the future of the pandemic from dwallacewells
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Over the last few months, coronavirus contrarians and those hoping for more optimistic news have spent a fair amount of time focusing on two particular areas of seeming weirdness. The first is how the heterogeneity of the disease spread affects the threshold of herd immunity — the point at which enough people in a community have been exposed to the disease that it can no longer really spread.
For example, it looks as if the low German fatality rate is not due to their superior testing capacity, but rather to the fact that the average German is less likely to get infected and die than the average Brit. Why? There are various possible explanations, but one that looks increasingly likely is that Germany has more immunological “dark matter” – people who are impervious to infection, perhaps because they are geographically isolated or have some kind of natural resistance.
But for those hoping that 25 percent represents a true ceiling for pandemic spread in a given community, well, it almost certainly does not, considering that recent serological surveys have shown that perhaps 93 percent of the population of Iquitos, in Peru, has contracted the disease; as have more than half of those living in Indian slums; and as many as 68 percent in particular neighborhoods of New York City.
In his write-up, Gu is careful to call this phenomenon “effective herd immunity,” not simply “herd immunity,” and in a follow-up on Twitter, he cautioned again that he did not mean to imply that the natural herd immunity level was as low as 10 percent, or even 35 percent. Instead, he suggested it was a plateau determined in part by better collective understanding of the disease and what precautions to take.
The most optimistic interpretation of the data was given to me by Francois Balloux, a somewhat contrarian disease geneticist and the director of the University College of London’s Genetics Institute. Balloux isn’t a pandemic pollyanna — he called COVID-19 a “super wicked problem” for which there was no get-out-of-jail-free card waiting in the research .
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