No Testing, No Treatment, No Herd Immunity, No Easy Way Out

[Igel]

1. The usual trajectory.

Optimism that we can win.

Then pessimism that things will get horrible. Helps when there's politics fueling it, to squelch the public optimism while maintaining some in private. If not for the other guy, we'd be safe and sound.

Then real pessimism, when it looks like maybe there's no easy out--because "maybe there isn't" means "certainly there can't be". At the same time, politics helps maintain the pessimism when all things going to hell means that a change has to be better.

It's still more likely than not that immunity happens, at least in most cases; and if not full, then fairly good partial immunity.

If the remdesivir rumors are true, then perhaps herd immunity (even partial) can be easily maintained. And if not, something else might come along. Some humans tend to be clever and persistent in solving problems.

And even the death rate probably isn't what it will be when the statisticians get done with it. Given that it's "intersectional" with race/sex/age/comorbidities all factored together it's unclear to me at least that those who are hospitalized are a decent cross-section of the population. Deaths are heavily weighted towards the elderly (not a huge % of the population), for example, and while people are concerned about making sure that the denominator includes much of the population nobody's worried about weighting the numerator properly to reflect population structure.