jtm

Right. Also:

" Shame on anyone who treats herd immunity as a boolean, rather than something that doesn’t do anything until you hit a threshold. "

This argument cuts both ways. "Herd immunity" is also not some magically threshold, after which *no one* gets infected. There's a term for it: overshoot.

From this piece by Carl Bergstrom and Natalie Dean, professors of biology and biostatistics: "Once enough immunity has been built in the population, each person will infect fewer than one other person, so a new epidemic cannot start afresh. But an epidemic that is already underway will continue to spread. If 100,000 people are infectious at the peak and they each infect 0.9 people,... (read more)

I agree that a lot of aspects of the early response have been less than ideal. And I'm seriously worried about the CDC being affected by the White House's explicitly stated goal of under-reacting to the pandemic.

With that said, I think it's important to keep in mind just how important trust in public health institutions will be for the next year.

There already is an enormous amount of misinformation out there competing for people's attention today. Even if mistakes have been made, the CDC is still far more reliable than the White House and many other loud sources, so we seriously don't want to reduce the CDC's share of information being acted on... (read more)