I’ve been watching them here:
https://coronavirus.1point3acres.com/
Just scroll down to the list of states and click on the beaker icon next to a state. It will show you the positive (and what percent they are), negative, Total tests (and total population). Right now, NY is up to 34% positive.
I’m guessing it was the town of Vo. It was not antibody tests, but rather they tested every person in the town for the virus.
True, but you are assuming the current group of cases have a uniform spread through the population. I would expect and hope that older people are being more careful, given their huge risk, and that they are under-represented in current cases.
Can anything be done to drive the total infections down and the infection fatality rate (IFR) down? Obviously the quarantine is about keeping total infections low, which should also drive the IFR lower, because
- you protect the most vulnerable
- you keep the medical field from getting overwhelmed, so they can devote more care to each case
- And it gives them time to find better treatments
- And ultimately gives enough time for a vaccine to be created
Surely after seeing Italy, many old people in the U.K. are smart enough to hide inside, even if the government didn’t require it. That alone should be enough to make a dent in the IFR (in my own unprofessional opinion).
Perhaps the Imperial paper is naive in starting from a disaster scenario in China, but I don’t think so. The whole question is what would happen if we did nothing. I think China at the start was a good model for that. Perhaps the Imperial paper is naive in assuming literally “nothing” is done to try to stop the infections in its worst case, but I don’t know what else you would use as a baseline.
Perhaps we could drastically lower the IFR simply by seriously quarantining the elderly, and maybe that would have way less economic effects. I don’t know. I don’t think we should assume they are too dumb to have thought of them, though, since there were movements that direction and it’s the first thing anybody would ask when looking at the rates by age.