No matter how you crunch the numbers, this pandemic is only just getting started
Scary op-ed from professor of the evolution and epidemiology of infectious disease at Harvard, William Hanage in The Guardian, on herd immunity:
There have been more than 93,000 cases of Covid-19 identified in the UK. Let’s round that up and say it is 100,000. So if the reports from the BMJ editorial are accurate, the actual number would be that multiplied by five, in which case there would have already been half a million infections in the UK. If this really is the peak and we see as many cases on the way down as on the way up, that would total 1 million infections from the initial surge in the UK – hopefully all of those people would then be immune. That would leave about 65 million people in the UK still without immunity. I am going to be unusually optimistic here, and assume that everyone who has Covid-19 becomes fully immune (not a given), and that the virus is towards the less transmissible end of the range of estimates currently available. If this is the case, you would need half your population to have been infected to achieve a level of population immunity that would stop the epidemic continuing to grow and overwhelming healthcare systems.
(tags: guardian health uk covid-19 pandemics herd-immunity future)
Irish COVID-19 model showing an R0 below 1.0
This is fantastic news — our lockdown is working! ‘The April 16 2020 modelling data on COVID-19 in Ireland from the Irish Epidemiological Modelling Advisory Group, part of the National Public Health Emergency Team (NPHET).’
PEPP-PT closes down the decentralised protocol option
The EU-wide PEPP-PT COVID-19 contact tracing project is quietly switching to a protocol built around a centralised database; better to stick with the still-decentralised, fully open source DP3T protocol, which has published its open source apps and SDKs: https://twitter.com/mikarv/status/1251044870367690753
(tags: pepp-pt dp3t protocols ios android contact-tracing covid-19 pandemics)
Sarah Owens’ Table Loaf Recipe
recommended by Colette