Quote Originally Posted by Prediction? Pain. View Post
Interesting read. Thanks for the link. But my takeaway is that nobody knows. A couple of the people quoted in that article who give numeric "herd immunity" estimates are mathematicians. One of those mathematicians (who studies chaos theory in Scotland) thinks it could be as low as 20%, but even then she admits that her calculations seem optimistic. Another mathematician, this time from Stockholm, thinks 20% is unlikely but that ~40% could be possible. The article next says that an epidemiologist at Harvard says that he thinks the range is anywhere from 20% to 60%, but that the lower end of that is more unlikely than the higher end. And finally, the article quotes a couple of other people -- biologists who study epidemiology and infectious disease modelling -- who cast doubt on the current lip service being played to "natural herd immunity" in popular discourse:
"We just keep running the models, and it keeps coming back at less than 20%. It's very striking."
Hopefully she is right.