I saw that study and gave my feedback already because it has large biases.
The authors acknowledge the study's other limitations. While they factored in sex, race and ZIP code, the survey does not account for age imbalances or a potential bias favoring individuals who were in good health and, therefore, able to volunteer. The effect of such biases, the study notes, is hard to ascertain. Another bias that this article ignored was many of us heard about this from friends and wanted to sign up because we thought we might have had it and wanted the free testing for antibodies. I actually looked some to see if I could sign up.
Thus, the ignored bias is people would go out of their way to get into the study if they thought they were already infected while healthy people would not want to volunteer.... why take the added risk?
Anyway, even ignoring the biases, you need 60% for herd immunity.
After weighting to match the county population by race, sex and ZIP code, the prevalence rate was adjusted to 2.81%, according to the study. Other factors, including uncertainties relating to the sensitivity of the tests that were used, contributed to the range of up to 4.16% So at the max with no biases they calculated 4.16% so we'd need 60/4 = 15 times more infections to reach heard immunity. We're running at 20 to 50% ICU capacity now so we could handle maybe 2 or 4x but not 15x.... Ventilators can handle 3 or 4 x more patients but some think that is still growing due to the length of time they are used... but even 4x is far below 16x thus we can't just open up based on the Stanford study.
sccgov.org
So the math still is overwhelming in favor of social distancing and other measures we are doing now. |
