Luciferase, try selling your 'Swedish Model' with its huge death to population ratio compared to Australia. If Australia had gone down the Swedish road, based on that countries stats, we should now be looking at 3,800 (actual 71) deaths from 35,000 (actual 6,612) infections, with 1,300 (actual 26) new cases per day, giving us 70 (actual 1) deaths a day.

Why Not "herd immunity"; from an article in 'The Guardian' by Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz. (an epidemiologist working in chronic disease).

Herd immunity is a simple epidemiological concept that describes the state where enough people are immune to a disease that it stops spreading in the population. Basically, if 80 people out of 100 can’t get the disease, then the 20 people who can get it will be protected because they are never actually exposed. Any outbreaks of the infection would quickly die out in this scenario.
In Australia, that would mean roughly 15-17 million coronavirus infections. The death rate from coronavirus, given a health system that is not overwhelmed is likely to be around 0.3-0.6%. Multiplying those numbers, if we pursue herd immunity, the best-case scenario has between 43,000 and 100,000 people in Australia dying. A more pessimistic view of the fatality rate, where the hospital system is overwhelmed, as many as 250,000 people could die before reaching a herd immunity threshold of only 60-70%."

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/17/herd-immunity-is-a-fatal-strategy-we-should-avoid-at-all-costs

Paul1405,

I note the range 0.3-0.6% based on the Diamond Princess analysis. I have more faith in the study I've already referred to, 0.37%, being based on a real community with a normal age demographic, not figures projected from the demographic onboard a cruise-ship. I'll stick with 80% antibody positive as the herd immunity target, rather than the authors 60-70% he based his calcs upon, which he seems to derive from nowhere.

By my reckoning, given the population of Sweden of 10M, to reach herd immunity will involve the death of 30,000. So far there are 3,800 dead in Sweden, meaning it's 1/8 of the way towards herd immunity, unlike Australia.

The author talks of the lack of homogeneity of HI as if it's a major point. The second law of thermodynamics will take care of that over time.

He refers to http://tinyurl.com/ybrcm3wz where community division is noted but I'll pick this as the most pragmatic statement from a Swede, '“I’m proud that Sweden is allowing us to take responsibility ourselves instead of being under lockdown,” says Therese Börjlind, a 35 year old accountant, rushing to a family gathering.' If everybody does that, including the >80's and >60's with co-morbidities the article refers to (which the state must aid in nursing homes, particularly), the less likely will be a need to close school to slow the spread when it's rate is too high, as mentioned.

Sweden has control over the capacity of its health system and the rate of spread of the virus. The fact it's death number or rate is this figure or that must be seen within these parameters, not compared with Australia.

That Sweden is performing some 'experiment' is only true in seeing whether an educated population sufficiently shares acceptance of science and disavows policy based in hope of a vaccine. The greater experiment is what we are trying in Australia, which has no successful precedent with such a virus, inside or outside a lockdown situation.

I came across an article today that listed all deaths in Australia from the Wuhan Virus with their ages and I ran it through some calculations. (Note some ages were listed as 'in their 80's' etc which I rounded as being 85, 75 etc.) Doing that shows that the average age at death is 79.06 . Only two people under 60 have died from the KungFlu and one of those wasn't Australian.

The upshot is that this is an old persons disease. The young get it, and recover, having developed anti-bodies. Indications from research overseas is that the number who have such anti-bodies is being massively under-estimated.

So calculations like those from Paul where he applies infection fatality rates of 0.3% to the whole population utterly misunderstands reality. The fact is the IFR for those under 60 is effectively zero.

So if we had vigilantly isolated the elderly from the outset and allowed those who weren't ever really endangered by the virus to contract it and build anti-bodies, we would be in a very much better place than at present.

There is no reason why we couldn't adopt that policy right now except that it would require the entire political and medical system to admit monumental error. And that's never gunna happen.

Sorry to have to waste a post, but I misunderstood your figures Paul, Sweden has 1511 deaths as at yesterday. Call it 1600 today, so its a tick over 5% towards HI.

If it is decided that people over a certain age are to be sacrificed for the convenience of younger people, by exposing them again and again to the Covid-19 virus, but who wish to avoid having to go through the agonies of not being able to breathe day after day while the virus damaged or destroyed one's lungs, kidneys and other organs, can I please respectfully suggest that we of the wrong age be given pills or injections of some sort, like in Solent Green ? Maybe cyanide, or just a good dose of morphine ?

Perhaps something relatively painless, so that as we fade away, we can contemplate the future, say in forty or fifty years, for our tormentors, and be consoled by the possibility that more virulent strains of the virus will soon strike people at younger and younger ages.

Wow, I never thought that I would ever recall the spirit of Charlton Heston :). And against fascism too !

Joe

mhaze, Paul's 0.3% figure you refer to is actually mine, which is derived from a 0.37% rate across a general demographic in Germany and a presumption of 80% as the target for HI. Paul's article mentions a paper based on projections to a younger demographic based on the Diamond Princess, which corroborates my figure. You provided a link previously to figures which support mine, and now you have a new set based on your own analysis of what may be an unrepresentative sample from China.

Paul's article, without stating any basis for calculation, says "If we take a more pessimistic view of the fatality rate, where our hospital system is struggling, we could see as many as 250,000 people dead before we reached the herd immunity threshold of 60-70%.". That just won't happen, even if we had no health system at all, and it's plain fear-mongering garbage. Let me explain.

Say we take the article's worst case in the range given of 0.6% death from infection, and, highest theoretical HI threshold the article mentions of 85% (I read the reference attached to the article and can find 82% if the R0 is nearly 6, but oh well) So, we have 25M Australians x 85/100 x 0.6/100 = 127500 deaths. Let's add 5% as the proportion of people who would be hospitalized (the UK experience), bugger it, no let's double that, and let's assume they all die! Now we're up to 140,000. What else do we have to assume to get up to 250000?

It doesn't help to have such hysterical figures thrown up by the Guardian for anyone to propagate as fact. You have to believe there is an agenda there. Why does it always come down to a division between those who believe in pixie-dust (a vaccine will come, viable storage for intermittent energy sources will come) versus those driven by data? We are a scientifically illiterate nation living in a fantasy-land, and our impending continued isolation from the world just cements the fact.