A week or two ago (I can no longer reckon the passage of time), Bill talked about the hypothesis that the Wuhan virus has been present in California since last fall, and that a far larger percentage of the population has already had it and is asymptomatic than the currently accepted numbers. The hypothesis takes into account the millions of people who entered California from China last fall, a particularly high percentage of whom were from Wuhan. It also suggested that the higher-than-usual and sooner-than-usual seasonal flu infections and deaths which started last fall might be accounted for by an earlier infection of the Wuhan virus. There was link to an article at National Review by Victor Davis Hanson that discussed the hypothesis.
Bill has pointed to the real-time data from that company that tracks the number of fevers in real time as a possible bit of data to add to the hypothesis. In particular, it showed that California from San Francisco to San Diego showed no spike in fevers this spring compared to last year. It was already flat and then the number dropped after the shutdown.
Further analysis had to await the advent of antibody tests and controlled surveillance studies. Well, the first of these has just come in from Santa Clara.
https://www.dailywire.com/news/antibody-test-results-from-california-suggest-covid-death-rate-significantly-lower-than-reported
This first study seems to show that while the number of people with anitbodies to the Wuhan virus is 50-80% higher than the number of confirmed cases in the county, the total was only 5% of the population or less. That means that 95% of those tested did not have the antibodies, demonstrating conclusively (if the sample was representative, which they tried to achieve) that herd immunity is not even remotely close to being met.
I have been wondering for some time whether anyone has conducted a study of deaths in Southern California last fall and winter. It seems to me that it ought to be fairly easy to demonstrate that it was or was not present by examining nursing home and senior community populations. If the rate of death in this population was very significantly higher than usual, then it’s likely the virus was present. But if it’s not, then it probably wasn’t. To follow up, antibody tests among the people currently living in those places, as well as those who work there, would provide another data point.
And if it turns out that the death rate in nursing homes was five times higher than usual, why didn’t anyone notice and start asking questions? Doesn’t the CDC track such things already?
I haven’t seen anything like this discussed anywhere. Has anyone else?
EDITED TO ADD: There is also an antibody survey in The Netherlands just published showing that 3% of the population has antibodies.
EDITED AGAIN TO ADD: Antibody study of random people out and about in Chelsea, Massachusettes (the hottest CV-19 spot in the state) found one-third (64 out of 200) had antibodies: https://www.dailywire.com/news/massachusetts-researchers-tested-people-on-the-street-for-coronavirus-antibodies-one-third-had-them
EDITED AGAIN TO ADD: I’ve been thinking about the discrepancy in the results of those antibody tests and I wonder if the tests aren’t measuring exactly the same things. (Many antibody tests have been concurrently developed over the last several weeks at academic and commercial labs, so it would make sense that they are not all alike or equally effective.) So the next thing I would like to see is the test used in Santa Clara used in another study in Chelsea and vice versa.
2 replies on “Question about herd immunity in California”
There is a lot of asymptomatic spread so these numbers and percentages may not indicate much. There is a possibility that someone got to USA early with the virus nearly cleared from their system so passed on a naturally weak version of the virus. This disease puts a lot of people on respirators and I suspect that would have been noticed. If you had an early out break why no early overwhelmed hospital? Why not the disaster we saw in Milan and other parts of Italy. The things now happening in Spain, London, etc.
Something to consider is that if your a Chinese person fleeing a plague at home what is the first thing you do on arriving at the free world airport? Answer, hit the airport pharmacy and buy any over the counter drugs you think may work. We keep finding off the shelf medications that have an effect of curing this disease. There may be something on sale at LA airport that needs to be looked at carefully as another solution.
There is also a problem with the early tests. Many were test kits with antigens for the flu, the common cold and ordinary corona-virus. They could pick up sars-cov-19 but would also give an initial flag of any and all three in the patient. That helped with treatment but not with a mapping of the disease. It also means that a lot of people with ordinary flu, a sniffle or very mild Covid 19 were tying up hospital beds because we at that stage did not know what it was that was the problem.
Thirdly we can’t rule out that if sars-cov-19 came from the lab it’s not the only one of Dr Shi Zhengli’s baby’s to get loose. There may be other less lethal variants loose circulating the world.
I suspect Dr Shi Zhengli will not be available to ask.
Interesting. Thanks, Wesley!
I will attempt to answer one of your questions. Our systems would not have been overwhelmed like in Milan or other places because we already had the highest per-capita number of ventilators and ICU beds than anywhere else on the planet by a factor of at least three, maybe significantly more than that. In Washington state, where there was an early outbreak but no subway system to spread it so rampantly (and, to be fair, where they were alerted almost immediately because their Patient 0 self-identified), they never used a single bed in the military temporary hospital, and had excess ventilator capacity. Even in NYC, despite the freak-out, they never came anywhere close to running out of ventilators or ICU beds. The auxiliary military hospitals were hardly used.