As a coauthor in this study I'm going to start by saying what its conclusions are NOT: (i) it does NOT conclude that lockdowns/social distancing are unnecessary; (ii) it does NOT say "herd immunity" is ~20% regardless. In fact that number is conditional on social distancing 1/6
The study does say that given observed trajectory, a SECOND wave may be considerably smaller IF there is a large variance in the distribution of both biological susceptibility AND exposure/social contact. There's a lot to unpack there 2/6
As @joel_c_miller put it recently, heterogeneity/variation is complicated, and often doesn't change significantly the conclusions from "homogeneous" models. The point is that here it just might, but we are mostly ignorant of the actual parameter values 3/6
Two corollaries to the main results information on the distribution of biological susceptibility to #coronavirus could be very useful (but it is also very hard to infer), and that social distancing has a larger effect than its average may suggest -- and that's good news. 4/6
The flip side is that relaxing lockdowns/social distancing measures will have a more detrimental effect than what is predicted by the average (bad news). That's because of the dependence of reproductive numbers on degree of exposure 5/6
So like everything in science, this is not the ultimate truth. This is not saying everyone else was wrong and we are right, and especially is not saying public health policy must conform to this one study, but that this is likely an important factor that deserves attention. 6/6
