Johns Hopkins Doctor Thinks COVID Will Be Largely Gone By April, Half of U.S. Has Herd Immunity

[mystery-ak]

Johns Hopkins Doctor Thinks COVID Will Be Largely Gone By April, Half of U.S. Has Herd Immunity
By Katherine Fung On 2/19/21 at 2:53 PM EST

Dr. Marty Makary, a surgeon and a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and Bloomberg School of Public Health, believes that the coronavirus will be "mostly gone" by April.

In an op-ed published by The Wall Street Journal on Friday, Makary argued that half of the U.S. has already reached herd immunity because there are more coronavirus cases in the country, possibly 6.5 times as many, than the 28 million that have been reported.

Combined with the 15 percent of Americans who have already begun receiving the vaccine, the doctor argued that normal life will return by the spring.

"There is reason to think the country is racing toward an extremely low level of infection," Makary wrote. "As more people have been infected, most of whom have mild or no symptoms, there are fewer Americans left to be infected. At the current trajectory, I expect COVID will be mostly gone by April, allowing Americans to resume normal life."

more
https://www.newsweek.com/john-hopkins-doctor-thinks-covid-will-largely-gone-april-half-us-has-herd-immunity-1570615

[PeteS in CA]

From what I've read elsewhere, this doc's guesstimate is based on three elements:

* The population of those who have received at least one of two vaccine shots, currently ~42 million people;

* The population of those who have recovered from Covid, currently ~ 28 million people (total cases - total deaths);

* His estimate of the population of those who had and recovered from Covid without being tested, possibly not knowing they had it.

That later, unknown but estimated, number is significant to his April guesstimate. One can quibble that number, but unlike some "experts'" pronouncements, at least he's spelled out the bases for his guesstimate, i.e. transparency. One thing that is obvious is that as those three populations increase the cumulative susceptibility to Covid in the US will decrease. Had states like CA, OR, WA, and NY done as well as the Dakotas, WV, and NM (especially early on!) the US would clearly be seeing the effects of vaccination numbers on new cases numbers instead of thinking we might be seeing the effects of vaccinations numbers.