Kumar wrote: ↑Sat Sep 11, 2021 10:43 pm
A CDC study of serological survey showed almost 36% of COVID patients did not have antibodies at 3 weeks.
https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/27/9/21-1042_article
...
The above study is very interesting. It is a very small sample size. IIRC, we observed this behavior with our own Suresh. So iF India had 65% exposure based on serosurvey and sero survey does not detect 36% cases, approx 84% of our population has been exposed
I have given up on trying to understand the numbers these days... Too much of cross-interactions to make a clear sense. The general conclusion I reach is that vaccines are not as great as I once thought they would be (for stopping the spread or waves), but that they are indeed helping. And helping quite a bit. I also conclude that sero-positivity was never much of a useful stat to make judgements on anything or to predict/expect infection levels (especially so, after vaccinations started).
Covid is just going to be around for a while... Maybe another year more as a disease that people will keep talking about... But hopefully in another 3 or 4 months, most countries will have some 40 or 50% people with two doses and at least 60-70% with one dose (and many ciountries with a lot of booster recipients too). The death numbers will all be fairly low (around 0.3% or so, I am going to guess), and we will all decide to move on.
Basically the world is now moving on, for most purposes, and only international travel needs to open up now.
Not sure when the countries will realize that there is no longer much of a point in staying shut to the rest of the world anymore, as the number of people traveling is all pretty small compared to the number of people who already have the disease in the countries, who can start off waves anyway. You don't need international travelers to do that. Hope everybody sees this, and drops all this BS about travel bubbles and all that. No point.
It is just another disease. A pretty bad one, but one that we just need to live with.
Test well, watch the numbers closely, and institute lockdowns etc locally, as needed. But move on with our lives! Let the doctors handle the disease when people come down with it, like all other diseases. If people aren't dumb en masse in entire towns (the US situation in areas controlled by an anti-vaccine majority), there will no longer be the kind of hospital care issues under a semi-vaccinated regime, unlike the issues we had in the earlier waves.
Speaking of that, are we ever going to have a therapeutic medicine developed for this? Is the expensive monoclonal antibody treatment all we will ever have? No chance for a medicine? Some 20 months into it, there is still no good news on medicines...
