Thread by @statesdj

That 1 in 5 New York City residents has already been infected with SARSCOV2 is a very dark cloud, but there may be a silver lining. It has to do with epidemics and social networks
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cnbc.com/2020/04/23/new…

Epidemics spread through social contacts. The most connected people spread the virus most quickly, but they also tend to get infected earliest
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royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.10…

As we’ve all heard many times, the goal of social distancing is to “flatten the curve”. The reason we want to do that is to avoid overwhelming health care systems because when good nursing and medical care aren’t available, mortality rates shoot up
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Social networks follow what are called power law distributions. There are a few people with lots of connections and lots of people with only a few connections
snap.stanford.edu/class/cs224w-2…
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If 21% of New York City residents are now seropositive and hopefully immune to reinfection, most of the highly connected people with the largest number of contacts may now be seropositive and resistant
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The initial spread of the disease & massive burden on the health care system was likely spread through the most connected people in the exposure network. If that’s true, when we relax social distancing, spread may not be as fast as it was initially
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We really, really need to hard data on who is seropositive before making policy on a theory like this, but it’s possible that we may be able to open up hard hit cities more rapidly than we might have thought possible🤞🙏
7/fin