Thread by @tomaspueyo

Great news this week:
- Pfizer's vaccine 90% effective
- Moderna's vaccine 94.5% effective
- Immunity to #COVID lasts (unless the virus mutates enough, still unknown)

How should this change our decisions in countries like the US? Thread

nytimes.com/2020/11/17/hea…

One of the key arguments of Herd Immunity apologists like @ScottWAtlas or Anders Tegnell is that you can't stop the virus. That means it only stops killing people when 50%-80% of the population has caught it (66% in Manaus).
nature.com/articles/d4158…

If it had taken us 5 years to get a vaccine, it might have made sense: it might be too hard to control the virus this long. But now we can guess that by mid-late 2021, enough ppl might be vaccinated to stop it.

So a country like Sweden has 2 choices:
a. Stop the spread and keep infections to ~10% of the population (1M) and ~7k deaths. Wait for a vaccine. Open up the economy in the meantime as cases are low.

b. Keep going. By late 2021, maybe 25% of the pop might be infected. That would add ~17k deaths (0.17% of the total population). And the economy would probably not benefit that much.

What if the US kept going at the current pace?
Let's assume 150k new cases per day (like today) until Sept 2021. That's 40M more cases. At the current case fatality rate of 1.5%-2%, that's 600k-800k more deaths — and even more long-term chronic conditions. And no economic benefit

This is a hard choice.
On one hand, we have WWII levels of deaths.
On the other, a better economy, with some effort for the next 8-10 months

I don't know what I would do!