Sweden attains herd immunity?

YMMV wrote:

You mean Finland and Norway, who have much younger populations than Sweden and don't have millions of Middle Eastern refugees, when care homes and refugees combined made up most of the deaths? Finland and Norway, where there is almost no mask use and in the case of Finland, social distancing is nil?

One thing is becoming clear: mask use makes no difference on covid mortality, and has some serious health negatives.

This is the winning post in the thread.

Leftists need to stop using the fallacy that all countries are the same and that the virus's effects are the same everywhere. Don't argue while losing like Armstronglivs.

Per capita rates of refugee resettlement: Sweden 493. Norway 465.

Bad Wigins wrote:

SprintTriathlon wrote:

It is generally accepted amon scientists that 70% is needed.

Obviously it's not generally accepted since a study several months ago found only 1 in 5 infections even progress far enough for antibodies to form.

That means 20% effectively serves as 100%. 80% of the people have such high cellular immunity they don't need antibodies.

That is such a bunch of pseudo science mush it is almost impossible to even discuss. You have obviously latched on to the Scott Atlas theory that evidence of some cross reactive T cell immunity response means that you only need 20-50% infected to get to herd immunity.

Cross reactive T-cell immunity is only a theory. And cross reactive t-cell immunity is not protective immunity. You still get infected and can still transmit the virus. You MAY be able to better fight off the virus because T cells with previous exposure to other corona viruses have shown to be responsive to COVID 19. But that is all that is known at this point. Everything else is conjecture and speculation.

Precious Roy wrote:

Cross reactive T-cell immunity is only a theory. And cross reactive t-cell immunity is not protective immunity. You still get infected and can still transmit the virus. You MAY be able to better fight off the virus because T cells with previous exposure to other corona viruses have shown to be responsive to COVID 19. But that is all that is known at this point. Everything else is conjecture and speculation.

"'This is encouraging data,' says virologist Angela Rasmussen of Columbia University. Although the studies don’t clarify whether people who clear a SARS-CoV-2 infection can ward off the virus in the future, both identified strong T cell responses to it, which 'bodes well for the development of long-term protective immunity,' Rasmussen says."

I'll trust a scientist over an anonymous poster who claims to be a lawyer. It's all speculation and conjecture as to whether you can pass the Bar Exam or not.

Bringing in Brazil, which according to this guy pretty much ignored

the masks and lockdown. Of course the site is 'lockdownsceptic'

so take as you will.

https://lockdownsceptics.org/brazil-automatic-recuperation/

Brazil – Not the Disaster We’ve Been Led to Believe

---

I’d like to pause to make a very important point here. While social distancing measures were

put in place in all these states, they were barely adhered to. Uber rich São Paulo probably did

the best at keeping people inside, but the northeastern and Amazonian states are among

Brazil’s poorest. People needed to keep working to survive. And Rio: Hah, forget it. Anyone

who has spent any time there knows that you simply can’t tell the cariocas what to do.

Distancing there made Sweden look like North Korea. By the time Bolsonaro started

demanding the economies re-open, most people had already decided to go back to work.

.

.

Okay, but you say that Brazil is still seeing high death and case counts? Yes, you are absolutely right. When an epidemic is allowed to move around a massive

country like Brazil without constantly being squashed by repeated

economy-destroying regional lockdowns, it affects different areas at different

times, drives up their numbers, sees them fall, then moves on, hits other areas and drives up

their numbers, affecting the overall numbers for the country while obscuring a lot of

progress everywhere else (see: the Sunbelt Spike in the USA). Yet the media likes to pretend

that this is due to governors ‘failing’ with their lockdowns as the epidemic moves to their

area. Cue up the hysteria now about the US midwest, as the Sunbelt Spike has now been

ended (without using, I might add, hard lockdowns).

In Brazil, while great swathes of the country are now basically back to normal, the case and

death growth in Brazil is now being driven by a raging epidemic in the densely populated far

south and the much poorer central core of the country.

-

.

Why would Brazil have been any different? People without a single clue between them talk

like Bolsonaro could have locked down the country by decree and Brazilians would have

obeyed passively like in Auckland, and we would have the same death toll as Denmark. These

people have never been to Brazil. The effort it would have taken to suppress the unruly and

increasingly desperate population of 207 million highly unequal people spread out from

megacities to jungle tribes would have required full on martial law being reinstated in a

country that was a military dictatorship until the 1960s. Even that might not have worked.

Blood would have been shed for sure. Seriously, is this what the ‘progressives’ want? The

subjugation of one of the most free spirited countries on Earth by the military? All to try, and

surely fail, to snuff out a vírus so deadly you have to be tested to see if you have it? Has the

world gone crazy?

.

.

Oh, and Bolsonaro the butcher? The man leading the Brazilian people to the slaughterhouse?

He just hit his highest approval rating since the election.

Brazil is a land of lockdown skeptics, Covid deniers, and miracle cure enthusiasts, and many

Brazilians feel pretty happy with their leadership, despite the death toll. While everyone else

is gearing up for the second wave, we are looking forward to getting back to normal when

the epidemic runs its natural course, vaccine or no vaccine. Maybe, just maybe, we can still

have Carnival next year.

___

Umm Cross Reactivity is not a theory. Unless we’re going to devolve in it is a theory the same way gravity is discussion. It’s been proven for many other contagions. If you want to dispute the % of the population with pre-existing cross reactive resistance that is a topic that is open for discussion. But I don’t know how you think the immune system and viruses work. But just because you have antibodies does not mean you cannot be infected or pass on a virus. That does not exist. Antibodies fight off infections, they don’t put up a magic barrier the virus can’t get through. T-Cell immunity works in much the same way in that once the pathogen enters your body it is a line of defense so your body fights off the virus without you knowing you ever had it. There are very few viruses we have eliminated. Most we have just built up the immune system response to pass them around without fear of serious illness. COVID will be the same way. It will likely be of minimal concern given it is a very stable virus compared to those that mutate more frequently that we see repeated sickness from.

facts and reason wrote:

"'This is encouraging data,' says virologist Angela Rasmussen of Columbia University. Although the studies don’t clarify whether people who clear a SARS-CoV-2 infection can ward off the virus in the future, both identified strong T cell responses to it, which 'bodes well for the development of long-term protective immunity,' Rasmussen says."

I'll trust a scientist over an anonymous poster who claims to be a lawyer. It's all speculation and conjecture as to whether you can pass the Bar Exam or not.

You are posting this like it is some bombshell. This is literally how the immune system works.

Conservative commentators jump on these cross-reactive and COVID-19 convalescent T-cell studies as strong evidence of herd immunity. It is likely true that there is 1) some level of "immunity" driven by prior coronavirus infections and 2) some people may generate protective T-cell responses after infection while testing antibody negative. Neither of these are some earth-shaking finding - they are how the immune system works.

I have not seen numbers that suggest either of these mechanisms are widespread enough to confer population-level immunity. Go read the swedish T-cell study (now in Cell) - 30% (9/31) of healthy people showed T-cell responses, vs 4/31 for antibodies. This is not in addition to antibodies. Moreover, there's far from hard evidence that T-cell cross-recognition can display a robust protective effect. It's wishful thinking. Look what happened when we opened back up in June with similar wishful thinking.

As an aside, what does it mean if say 20-50% of the population will see a minor case due to T-cell cross-recognition? They still can transmit the virus, presumably. This cross recognition has already been baked into all the stats we are working with, it's not new. I'm not sure it changes the calculus for disease progression, aside from offering a possible satisfying biological explanation for the wide range of symptoms seen.

It is plausible that, at this current level of social distancing ,population immunity is contributing keeping R_t down low enough. Twisting this to say "we are all immune, time to stop caring" is clearly (willfully) ignorant.

So, clearly COVID can cause serious illness in some people. Some people show mild symptoms, possibly due to T-cell cross reactivity, among other things. These people "mild" or even "asymptomatic" cases can still transmit the disease, as you just said.

Unclear how having a biological explanation for mild infections changes anything, aside from a possible undercount of those infected using serology studies. Again, I don't think any data suggests a large enough undercount (afaik only the swedish study, now in Cell) to say we are home free. Anyone who is categorically saying we are at herd immunity it playing partisan politics or doing some serious wishful thinking. Just look at surges around the world.

As a side note, 104/120 people on a fishing vessel caught the disease (see recent UW paper) so clearly any prior cross-reactive protection isn't enough to keep you from testing positive.

I also trust the scientists. Let's see what the scientist in the article you cite (Shane Crotty) says about T cell responses and "protective immunity":

"4/ These observations about pre-existing T cell immunity (also call "crossreactive immune memory", which avoids the word "immunity" that sometimes gets misinterpreted as “protective immunity” [sorry, immunology is complicated] ) are important because...

5/ ...these memory cells MAY impact people’s responses to SARS-CoV-2 infection, or COVID-19 vaccines.

6/ Therefore, we have pointed out that these coronavirus crossreactive immune memory T cells are important to pay attention to in human COVID-19 studies this year.

7/ We SPECULATE that it is conceivable that these T cells may potentially reduce COVID-19 disease severity, based on things we know about flu and T cells.

8/ These are only speculations (no data) and because of their potential importance it is key for scientists to test these ideas, as quickly as possible. While scientists are racing as fast as possible, sophisticated research like this usually takes a lot of time and resources.

9/ We, and other labs, are working hard on these unanswered questions.

10/ Additionally, even if our most optimistic speculations about crossreactive T cell memory were found to be correct, it would mean that just as many people would get infected with SARS-CoV-2, but fewer would become severely ill and die from COVID-19.

11/ T cells generally don’t completely prevent infections, they limit disease (make it shorter and/or less serious). Thus, wearing a mask is much more effective than hoping you and the people around you have pre-existing T cell memory. Wearing a mask stops infections."

Herd immunity is protection from infection, not prevention of severe illness. Crotty's twitter thread was in response to a widely circulated twitter thread claiming that herd immunity is achieved through a combination of 10-20% who are actually infected with COVID 19 and have antibodies and speculation that @50% of the population has cross reactive T cell immunity. Crotty eviscerated this theory by noting that cross reactive T cell immunity does not stop infection or transmission. It MAY play a part in people having a more mild case of the virus. But that is not herd immunity. And we have absolutely no idea what percent of severe cases are prevented through cross reactive T cells. Crotty finishes his thread by concluding that wearing a mask is a much better way to stop the virus than relying on cross reactive T cells.

Of course, you just did a google search, pulled the article and didn't even notice that the article was about the research by the same guy in the twitter thread I posted. That must be embarassing.

Precious Roy wrote:

YMMV wrote:

You mean Finland and Norway, who have much younger populations than Sweden and don't have millions of Middle Eastern refugees, when care homes and refugees combined made up most of the deaths? Finland and Norway, where there is almost no mask use and in the case of Finland, social distancing is nil?

One thing is becoming clear: mask use makes no difference on covid mortality, and has some serious health negatives.

Per capita rates of refugee resettlement: Sweden 493. Norway 465.

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/06/canada-now-leads-the-world-in-refugee-resettlement-surpassing-the-u-s/

Sweden has over five times the Asian and African immigrant population of Norway:

YMMV wrote:

Precious Roy wrote:

Per capita rates of refugee resettlement: Sweden 493. Norway 465.

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/06/canada-now-leads-the-world-in-refugee-resettlement-surpassing-the-u-s/

Sweden has over five times the Asian and African immigrant population of Norway:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_Sweden#Current_population_of_immigrants_and_their_descendantshttps://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/01/29/where-displaced-syrians-have-resettled/ft_18-01-26_syriarefugees_map/

So, when you said "Finland and Norway, who have much younger populations than Sweden and don't have millions of Middle Eastern refugees", you actually meant Asian and African refugees. And when you said millions from the middle east, you meant 110k from Syria. I see. That makes lots of sense.

[quote]Precious Roy wrote:

The reality is that Sweden does not have herd immunity. Just look at what the real scientists are saying.

Of course it does. It has not seen double figures in daily deaths in over 6 weeks and has not exceeded 5 deaths in a day this entire months -- usually it has been 0 or 1 death a day.

From studies in China, antibodies only last for a few weeks to begin with. It's highly unlikely they'd catch every single case.

The patterns in infections and deaths are pretty much the best way to assess whether or not a region has attained high levels of immunity:

For example, Brazil, which quite literally does NOTHING to mitigate the spread of the virus, had cities with significant portions of their population wiped out along with overflowing hospitals. Apparently, those cities experienced a sharp drop-off in cases, despite having no mitigation measures. There is no explanation for it other than the virus having run its course through the local population. Again, these people take almost NO mitigation measures.

This does NOT mean the entire country has developed immunity. Only a localized region. In the case of Sweden, it's likely that regions of dense population have had the virus pretty much run its course, while other regions still have continued spread. Hence the near-linear drop-off in deaths (which is a much better measure than infections, since testing prevalence varies so widely).

The same is probably true for hard-hit states in the US south. These people are somehow convinced the virus is a scam to discredit Trump. A significant portion of them intentionally refuse any mitigation measures. Yet somehow, the case numbers are dropping (and very significantly). Either the Trump-Heads have somehow changed their minds, or there are just fewer people who can be infected.

You are creating a strawman argument. No one in the posts that I read said that T cells would stop viruses from being inhaled through the nose or mouth.

This is one of the tricks that lawyers try to use to sway the jury.

Does Crotty have any evidence to back up his claim?

"There have been extensive randomized controlled trial (RCT) studies, and meta-analysis reviews of RCT studies, which all show that masks and respirators do not work to prevent respiratory influenza-like illnesses, or respiratory illnesses believed to be transmitted by droplets and aerosol particles."

""We know, for example, children and younger adults are relatively spared from the severe consequences of this disease, and I think that one hypothesis might be that the pre-existing T cells that exist may be much more numerous or more active in younger age cohorts than in older age cohorts," Adalja said.

"And if you could compare people maybe with severe and mild illness and try and look at the T cells in those individuals and say, 'Are people who have severe disease less likely to have cross reactive T cells versus people who have mild disease maybe having more cross reactive T cells?' I think that there's biological plausibility to that hypothesis," he said. "It's clear though that the T cell presence doesn't prevent people from getting infected, but does it modulate the severity of infection? That's what it appears could be the case.""

This is much more than pure "speculation". This is a plausible hypothesis based on science.

Your "may" is absolutely worthless. The scientist showed enthusiasm.

You "may" get faster by training at the track, but there's no guarantee. You "may" get a stomachache if you eat that cake in the store. There could be E. coli bacteria on it. You "may" get into a car accident if you decide to ride the Uber car.

Your "mays" are absolutely worthless coming from an anonymous person on the internet who claims to be a lawyer.

You "MAY" be a lawyer in real life, but you've shown zero credentials.

AHS_XC wrote:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/brazil-coronavirus-manaus-herd-immunity/2020/08/23/0eccda40-d80e-11ea-930e-d88518c57dcc_story.html

For example, Brazil, which quite literally does NOTHING to mitigate the spread of the virus, had cities with significant portions of their population wiped out along with overflowing hospitals. Apparently, those cities experienced a sharp drop-off in cases, despite having no mitigation measures. There is no explanation for it other than the virus having run its course through the local population. Again, these people take almost NO mitigation measures.

This does NOT mean the entire country has developed immunity. Only a localized region.

From the article:

"“The problem is that we don’t know how many people are susceptible,” dos Santos Pereira said. “In the beginning, we were thinking it was everyone, but it doesn’t seem like the whole world is susceptible. . . . It is causing us to reconsider the theory of herd immunity.”"

Will you admit that scientists were wrong about the death count projections?

"It was initially believed that between 60 and 70 percent of the population needed to develop antibodies to reach collective immunity. But Guayaquil never broke 33 percent. Manaus, the capital of Amazonas state, never got past 20.

“Manaus is an interesting case, indeed,” said Jarbas Barbosa da Silva, assistant director of the Pan American Health Organization. “The hypothesis — and this is just a hypothesis — is that the peak we had in Manaus was very strong, and there was such widespread community transmission that it may have produced some kind of collective immunity.”"

The T-cell action against prior coronaviruses would perfectly explain the conundrum that the scientists are facing.

Are you suggesting that 0% T-cell activity "may" be just as effective as 20-50% T-cell activity?

Your counter-speculation would be far worse than the current hypothesis.

This is what PreciousRoy is suggesting, that 0% T-cell activity may be just as good as having up to 50% T-cell activity in the population. He's constantly pushing this idea that T-cell activity "may" do nothing at all.

facts and reason wrote:

This is what PreciousRoy is suggesting, that 0% T-cell activity may be just as good as having up to 50% T-cell activity in the population. He's constantly pushing this idea that T-cell activity "may" do nothing at all.

Can we expect anything less from an alleged lawyer?

He's trying to push the idea that 50% T-cell reactivity in a given population "MAY" do nothing, so don't get your hopes up about herd immunity.

This is what lawyers do to try to sway a jury to think that a murderer is innocent.

This is what lawyers do to give the impression that a rapist is an innocent guy that was just engaging in a "consensual" relationship.

This is what lawyers do after charging their clients $500 per hour or more.

facts and reason wrote:

Jesus, you've got to be one of the dumbest prolific posters on here.

Have you ever read an article from start to finish? Unlikely.

There are plenty of places with >>30% infected. The burden is on those who say "we are immune, let's open everything up." Last time we tried to open everything up we ended back at >1000 dead a day.

Everything you said is just a biased, non-scientific, BS opinion. So, you have declared the scientist in Sweden are lying but that understand science more than everyone else? My goodness. The likely reality is that people in Sweden do about the same amount of distancing as everyone everywhere else. Do you honestly believe that there are not skeptics on this in other countries....new flash, people are mostly the same everywhere, but it is nice to see those demanding everyone be treated the same, which they should, while simultaneously claiming that somehow Americans are stupid and don't know how to do the right thing. I am pretty sure most people inn the US have gone along with a lot more than the people in Sweden, and they have lost a lot more as a product of stupid politicians and unscientific psychopaths demanding and shaming everyone into their stupidity. We never should have done anything other than promote basic precautions for a couple months; the result would have been the same and there is not actual evidence now to the contrary. Sweden is good evidence the result is just the same and better if you just let the virus do its' business. Really, how many people in the US have died unnecessarily due infection caused by depressed immune systems propagated by the crap show of stress half of the American politic has forced on people. It is unscientific to claim that this added massive extra stress has not and is still not killing Americans. People need to calm down, stop lying and exaggerating, and get on with life peacefully taking minimal precautions as we walk out of this mess started by a bunch of insane uneducated narcissists. End of rant.

Precious Roy wrote:

YMMV wrote:

Sweden has over five times the Asian and African immigrant population of Norway:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_Sweden#Current_population_of_immigrants_and_their_descendantshttps://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/01/29/where-displaced-syrians-have-resettled/ft_18-01-26_syriarefugees_map/

So, when you said "Finland and Norway, who have much younger populations than Sweden and don't have millions of Middle Eastern refugees", you actually meant Asian and African refugees. And when you said millions from the middle east, you meant 110k from Syria. I see. That makes lots of sense.

This is massive distortion of the actual facts; the western asian population is the largest immigrant pop in Sweden; ~400,000; where do you think the middle east is? Also, good job at not including Iran, Iraq, Turkey, and Lebanon among others in your list. It is a trolltown of liars here on Letsrun isn't it?