MSNBC Makes Serious Mistake on Number of Deaths for Herd Immunity

I am not recommending herd immunity at all, but correcting the MSNBC estimate of 7 million Coronavirus deaths for herd immunity, instead of 1.5 million deaths, which is bad enough itself.

On the ReidOut, they take the “apparent” death rate of the number of Coronavirus deaths in the US divided by the confirmed Coronavirus cases and get 3%.  But what is the real number of infected cases?  According to the IHME modeling, only 22% are confirmed by tests.

So the true fatality rate = deaths / (confirmed cases / 0.22) = 0.22 x “apparent death rate”

= 3% x 0.22 = 0.66%.

If herd immunity takes 70%, then with the 330 million US population, 231 million must be infected.

The number of fatalities is then 231 million x 0.0066 = 1.52 million.

This is, of course, 0.22 of the 6.93 million that they use.

I have written a ton of posts pushing 95% masking for the US based on the IHME calculations of lives that can be saved, compared to the current US 59% masking.  The latest number is that 116,500 deaths can be saved in the US to January 1, 2021.

The new results are that masking protects the wearer, reducing the risk of infection to 1/3, as Dr. Redfield testified yesterday.  Social distancing reduces the risk of infection to 1/10 of that without it.

About Dennis SILVERMAN

I am a retired Professor of Physics and Astronomy at U C Irvine. For two decades I have been active in learning about energy and the environment, and in reporting on those topics for a decade. For the last four years I have added science policy. Lately, I have been reporting on the Covid-19 pandemic of our times.
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