Profile picture
, 3 tweets, 3 min read
My Authors
Read all threads
One of the problems with the “herd immunity” narrative is that we don’t know the duration of immunity to SARS-COV-2.

For other coronaviruses, and different diseases like malaria, immunity is not lifelong.

So letting the virus go vertical may just make it endemic in the West.
Yes, respiratory viruses are harder.

But nations used to set the policy goal of eradicating infectious diseases, before tech like PCR or often even a vaccine.

Now some have set a de jure or de facto goal not of eradicating COVID but making it endemic.
CITATIONS

Endemic coronaviruses
statnews.com/2020/02/04/two…

COVID-19 immunity
wired.com/story/sorry-im…

Malaria immunity
cdc.gov/malaria/malari…

Endemic vs epidemic
science.sciencemag.org/content/357/63…

Swedish policy
thelancet.com/journals/lance…

How diseases were eradicated
annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.114…
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh.

Enjoying this thread?

Keep Current with Balaji S. Srinivasan

Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

Twitter may remove this content at anytime, convert it as a PDF, save and print for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video

1) Follow Thread Reader App on Twitter so you can easily mention us!

2) Go to a Twitter thread (series of Tweets by the same owner) and mention us with a keyword "unroll" @threadreaderapp unroll

You can practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @balajis see all

Profile picture
Balaji S. Srinivasan
@balajis
There is a genuine, understandable, and yet bizarre sense in which the pandemic has now become normalized.
Having failed to put out the viral fire, people try to put it out of mind.

We have solved nothing. We have the possibility of more NYC-like flare ups.

But what was once exceptional is now less so. From 9/11 to just another terrorist attack. From the 1st COVID death to the Nth?
It’s “just” a sharp, detectable reduction in the quality of life for many and a loss of life for some.

The overall sense I get is that some countries that failed to control it have given up and decided to try to live with it, even as it retards or stops so many daily activities.
Read 4 tweets
Profile picture
Balaji S. Srinivasan
@balajis
Disagree with @asymmetricinfo.

1) We didn’t run out of global software businesses: Slack, Stripe, Coinbase, Robinhood, etc

2) On-demand is working for Instacart and Doordash. Autonomy will improve margins over time.

3) Regarding Uber, see next tweet
Uber was an absolutely phenomenal business, but it was hit by three things:

1) didn’t acquire Lyft
2) negative press
3) coronavirus

If 1/2 hadn’t happened, they may have run a low-margin scale business like Amazon.

But 3 broke much of the sharing economy, not just Uber.
With respect to this piece, one point is that the anecdote @jbarro mentions was part of a demand test that Doordash was running.

On substantive issue, it’s true that delivery is low margin, but Amazon does fine with low margin/high scale.
nymag.com/intelligencer/…
Read 6 tweets
Profile picture
Balaji S. Srinivasan
@balajis
When you publish something on social media, you can quickly determine if it’s popular but not whether it’s true.

What are some mechanisms for the latter? Two come to mind:

1) number of independent confirmations by others
2) parse and compare to a knowledge graph

What else?
1) Number of independent confirmations by others: similar to crypto, you wait for others to independently confirm key facts prior to thinking of an article as “true”

2) Parse and compare to a knowledge graph: look up each assertion in a database of facts
thenextweb.com/podium/2019/06…
Note that by making the knowledge graph an explicit input you can say “this claim is true given these premises”.

Would be interesting to partition a knowledge graph into the constant stuff (eg value of pi) and the variable stuff which differs between different groups.
Read 3 tweets

Embed code for your website

×
Follow Us on Twitter!

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!

This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3.00/month or $30.00/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Too expensive? Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal Become our Patreon

Thank you for your support!