no way NYC is anywhere close to 60%
Probably not, but I think they're the only major U.S. city that is even within a factor of three of that level.
That said, it's 60% of the exposed population, which isn't necessarily the same as 60% of the total population. If you manage to get 90% of the public to basically shelter in place and almost never interact with anybody, then herd immunity kicks in at 60% of the remaining 10%. You'll get occasional random one-off cases when you pass that threshold, but not very many.
Oh, yeah. Forgot about that one.
We'd see tons of reinfections if that were true.
Not necessarily. Right now, there's not a lot of travel going on. A single strain of a virus can largely burn itself out in a community, and then another strain comes along from outside, and you're back to square one.
A mutation in the next 6 months that renders the mRNA vaccines ineffective but is still highly contagious and deadly? You seriously think that's a virtual certainty?
It's hard to say, and I might just be being cynical here. Either way, the point remains that the number of mutations is directly proportional to the number of hosts the virus has passed through, so the more times the virus is transmitted, the more likely you are to get a mutation that affects the efficacy of a vaccine, of natural immunity, etc.
Hyperbolic statements like this only feed the skepticism of the "unbelievably stupid, selfish, reckless, and irresponsible". And the America south has not been uniquely afflicted, death tolls are higher in the NE, for example.
The northeast was hit hard because it was hit
early, before anybody had time to react, and also because its density is high enough to make it really, really hard for people to isolate themselves meaningfully. The fact that the South has relatively low density and had plenty of time to react, yet still epically failed to keep their numbers down to a sane level is a total embarrassment to me as someone who was born and raised there.
Some decent chunk of children(most, "a lot", who knows) don't seem capable of being infected, and of those who can, a very large proportion are completely asymptomatic. This study is essentially eliminates all them and gauges the infection nature of severe asthmatic and other compromised or otherwise susceptible children.
Harvard Gazette
disagrees with you. To summarize: In a study of 192 kids and young adults, of which about one in 4 tested positive, during the first couple of days of the disease, the young patients shed a
much higher viral load than adults, despite being asymptomatic. This is why I have serious doubts every time I read someone claiming that kids aren't a significant risk for spreading coronavirus. It really sounds like wishful thinking to me.
