SeattleGriz wrote: ↑Thu Apr 15, 2021 7:01 pm
JohnStOnge wrote: ↑Thu Apr 15, 2021 5:24 pm
Surely you understand that people can carry and spread this virus without being sick, right?
It's more complex than your statement.
4. Immunology of common sense
As an immunologist I trust a biological model, namely that of the human organism, which has built a tried and tested, adaptive immune system. At the end of February, driving home from the recording of [a Swiss political TV debate show], I mentioned to Daniel Koch [former head of the Swiss federal section “Communicable Diseases” of the Federal Office of Public Health] that I suspected there was a general immunity in the population against Sars-Cov-2. He argued against my view. I later defended him anyway, when he said that children were not a driving factor in the spread of the pandemic. He suspected that children didn’t have a receptor for the virus, which is of course nonsense. Still, we had to admit that his observations were correct. But the fact that every scientist attacked him afterwards and asked for studies to prove his point, was somewhat ironic. Nobody asked for studies to prove that people in certain at-risk groups were dying. When the first statistics from China and later worldwide data showed the same trend, that is to say that almost no children under ten years old got sick, everyone should have made the argument that children clearly have to be immune. For every other disease that doesn’t afflict a certain group of people, we would come to the conclusion that that group is immune. When people are sadly dying in a retirement home, but in the same place other pensioners with the same risk factors are left entirely unharmed, we should also conclude that they were presumably immune.
As Kalm suggested, that opinion was pretty much nuked by subsequent events. Note that the notes at the top say it's about Switzerland and note that it was originally written on June 10, 2020. Below are images for Switzerland from the Worldometer site as it is now. Look at the date scale cross the bottom at what was going on around June 10 then look at what has happened since. He was clearly wrong about what was going to happen. Take this quote for instance:
When the initial worst case scenarios didn’t come true anywhere, some now still cling to models predicting a second wave. Let’s leave them their hopes
What happened later in Switzerland is clearly completely inconsistent with his point of view at the time. The guy was completely wrong.
And BTW, I followed the IHME model for some time in detail. It did well for the United States overall. The whole time I was recording predictions and checking later the number of deaths predicted was within the uncertainty interval. If you had to say anything based on the point estimate (the center line) it UNDER stated what was going to happen.