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11 Nov, 4 tweets, 2 min read
Predictions of the herd immunity theorists were wrong, @tylercowen rightly points out

marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolu…
If a country had actually achieved herd immunity you would find it in the bottom right corner of this chart.
The country would have a high cumulative case rate and a low current case rate.

[→ interactive chart ourworldindata.org/grapher/immuni…] Image
Several people are asking, where is Sweden? It is in the top right corner.

Sweden is among those countries with the highest case rate up to now.
And Sweden is among those countries with the highest case rate right now. Image
At some point we will reach herd immunity – hopefully with the help of a vaccine –, but it should now be obvious that the loud claims of herd immunity advocates over the last months were wrong (and that they are partly responsible for the mess we are now in).

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More from @MaxCRoser

Max Roser Profile picture
14 Nov
Austria has now the highest rate of confirmed cases in the world. And the rate is still increasing.

Testing is very poor (the positive-rate is 22%) so that the true number of cases is much higher.

Austria now decided to implement a stricter lockdown: orf.at/#/stories/3189… Image
Austria has the highest rate of all countries with a population over a million people.

Andorra currently has a rate of over 1000 per million, but a small place with 76,000 people has obviously very volatile case rates.

Source with data for all countries ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-da…
This curve shows the number of deaths in Austria.

The average over the last week were 40 deaths per day.

[Here is the data: ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-da…] Image
Read 4 tweets
Max Roser Profile picture
12 Nov
How expensive is it to limit global warming to less than 2°C?

The IPCC reports that the median cost to limit warming to less than 2°C corresponds to an annualized reduction of economic growth by 0.06%, relative to a baseline annual growth of 1.6-3%

ipcc.ch/site/assets/up… Image
If the world economy would grow 1.6% the world economy in 100 years would be 1.016^100=489% the size of today’s economy.

With measures in place to limit warming to 2C, growth would be 0.06% smaller – i.e. 1.54%.
The world economy would then ‘only' be 461% of the size of today.
In case the world economy would grow 3% per year the world economy in 100 years would be 1.03^100=1922% the size of today’s economy.

With measures to limit warming to 2C, growth would be 0.06% smaller – i.e. 2.94%.

The economy would then ‘only' be 1813% the size of today.
Read 4 tweets
Max Roser Profile picture
1 Nov
1/ If we want to avoid situations in this pandemic in which we have to make the decision between more people dying or lockdown, we should increase testing.

It needs to be very easy for people to find out whether they are infectious or not.
2/ The number of tests is not the relevant statistic – a large outbreak needs more tests.


How many tests are needed depends on how many people are infected.

That’s the ratio of cases to tests: the *positive rate of tests* is telling us whether a country does enough tests.
3/ If a country tests enough, the positive rate is low. The country does many tests for each case they find.

You want to be in a situation where it's easy for people to find out whether they are infectious.
Whether you achieved that is visible in a low positive rate.
Read 15 tweets
Max Roser Profile picture
28 Oct
This is to me one of the saddest and most important charts on the pandemic.

Those countries that are doing bad right now (high on the y-axis) are largely the same countries that did worst overall in this pandemic (cumulative case rate until Aug 1 on x-axis). Image
This is a slightly different version of the same chart.

Here the x-axis shows the cumulative case rate up to the present (which means some of the correlation is simply due to current cases counting towards cumulative cases).

And with the color showing the postive rate. Image
This chart would show us when a country reaches herd immunity.

A country that actually achieves herd immunity will have a high cumulative case rate and the current case rate will be low → it will end up in the bottom right corner (where no country is right now).
Read 5 tweets
Max Roser Profile picture
20 Oct
The rise of confirmed cases in Europe is very rapid.

– This is showing the 7-day rolling average. Over the last week 138,500 cases were confirmed every day.
– The doubling time of confirmed cases for Europe as a whole is two weeks.

[interactive source ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-da…]
But as always, confirmed cases are only a fraction of total cases.

And testing has become worse in the last weeks – the positive rates have increased in many European countries – so that the true doubling rate is likely quite a bit faster.

[source ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-da…]
And across European countries that differences are large.

Belgium & the Czech Republic report more than 700 cases per million every day.

On the other hand Estonia & Norway report fewer than 30 per million. Testing there is better so that the true difference is likely larger.
Read 13 tweets
Max Roser Profile picture
18 Oct
1/n] The pandemic will end when we reach herd immunity. The question is how we get there.

In a world without science and technological innovation there would be no alternative: The only way to achieve immunity is for a large share of the population to get infected.
2] But that’s not the world we live in. We can achieve herd immunity via a vaccine.
3] So it's a question of how optimistic we are about medical innovation.
Being in favour of a high infection rate now makes sense if you are pessimisic about the world's chance to develop a vaccine or to make progress towards good antivirals.
Read 8 tweets

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