I keep hearing how New York City is in an absolute crisis over the Covid-19 virus. It is possibly going to go into a complete lockdown, again, and many bars and restaurants are already closed because the spread is so wild and out of control. But, lets look at the data and see if that is correct. (After all, isn’t that what the lame-stream media and Democratic politicians keep telling us we must do?) The two graphs below show the daily deaths and the confirmed infections based on the data published by Johns Hopkins University that I plotted. Just saying, but it looks to me like New York City essentially reached herd immunity in late August or early September.
Pretty much the same thing is shown if you look at confirmed infections for New York City. Yes, the cases are going up again after almost disappearing in late August, but they are starting to go down, again, and the number of cases is certainly nothing like it was in late March and early April.
Personally, I think that even without a vaccine, we are getting very close to herd immunity, at least in a practical sense. It looks like NYC is very close to herd immunity, and I think the rest of the country will reach what will amount to herd immunity early in 2021. I say this because many people have said that the actual number of people who have been infected is 4 to 5 times higher than the official “confirmed” number of cases. (According to an article in Nature from September, “Substantial underestimation of SARS-CoV-2 infection in the United States“, the actual ratio of actually infected to confirmed infected, is somewhere between 3 and 20. That would make my estimates on the low side, meaning that we may be even nearer to herd immunity.) As of 12/7/20, there were 14.949 million confirmed infections in the United States. If, indeed, the multiplier is 4, that would mean that the actual number of people who have been infected is about 60 million. Add to that the fact that there are about 200,000 new confirmed cases every day, which would translate to nearly 1 million actual new cases ever day, and that means that by the end of December, we will have almost 90 million people who have been infected. That is almost 25% of the population of the United States. Add to that the fact that 10 to 25 million people will be vaccinated every month, probably starting later this week. That means that by early February, between the number of people infected and the number vaccinated, we will have over 120 million people who have either been infected or vaccinated. While this is still only about 30% of all of the people in the United States, I suspect it will amount to herd immunity. (Officially, we are told that you need that number to be more like 60-70 percent, but I think this will follow the pattern of other recent pandemics.) I feel even more confident about this because in the case of the 1918 pandemic, it died off after about 1 year, in early 1919, after infecting about 25% of the American population. Also, the H1N1 pandemic, that started in April 2009 and died off in 2010, infected 60 million Americans, or about 20% of the US population. While the pandemic was not declared officially over until August 2010, cases fell off significantly after January of 2010.
So, while some areas of the country will have a rough couple of months ahead, I think the end is very near.
