Just wrapped a text convo with a buddy who is an infectious disease expert. We were talking about the Santa Clara antibody study whose preprint made a big splash yesterday, suggesting that COVID cases are way more common than our testing data suggest. 1/7
As a lot of smart people are pointing out, the paper’s results are not quite as earth shattering as media reports are making it out to be. Their lower end estimates are consistent with hypothesized asymptomatic/mild infection rates. There’s also the issue of false positives. 2/7
I’m more interested in how people respond to these data, though, than what the specifics of the paper are. And. People. Are. Losing. Their. Minds. So much armchair quarterbacking about how we shut down the economy for nothing. 3/7
This response is how we end up learning the wrong lessons. These studies are important for understanding possibilities of herd immunity. But even if the case fatality rate is .4% or .5% or even .1%, rather than 3%-5%, #StayAtHome orders were still needed. 4/7
The issue is the rapid increase in very, very sick patients needing critical care in ICUs. Whether or not we’re underestimating the number of cases by x10 or x20 or x50, we have a finite number of ICU beds, vents, and healthy health care providers to run them. 5/7
Whatever the “true” infection rate and mortality rate are, we’ve seen how quickly Italy, Spain, and NYC’s hospital systems became overwhelmed. This is the crucial thing for me. We needed to buy our health care system time to prevent it from collapsing (knock on wood we have). 6/7
Saying we could have avoided the economic outcomes because the disease is more prevalent misses the point entirely. We did it for our health care system. Is this economically ruinous? Absolutely for many of our neighbors. But we could/can manage that, too, if we want to. 7/7
