> We absolutely do. We have such a wealth of data and the signal is very strong.
We know who is likely to die. We do not know who is at risk of a life-long debilitating illness.
> That's because reinfection is extremely rare
We don't know this. What we know is that reinfection with a different strain is rarely detected, and that's a long way from the same thing.
> risk for non-fatal outcomes is typical of other influenza like illnesses
This is false.
> An interesting note is that many / most people have some sort of cross-protection through T-cell immunity (likely from other coronaviruses).
At best this is optimistic. We know some (less than half) have a T-cell response. We don't know yet if that response is beneficial, harmful, or has no effect at all. It would be premature to start any sort of public health intervention founded on this assumption.
> Yes we do. Pretty much every disease tails off.
This strongly depends on the reinfection rate. Which we don't know.
> The only debate right now is where this threshold is at for various jurisdictions. It is likely as low as 20%.
This is false. To get anywhere near 20% you need to know the effect of the T-cell response, or have some other mechanism for discounting a large portion of the population.
> All models are wrong but some are useful. If this model cannot explain real data from cities and countries (eg: stockholm, UK locales) then it is relatively useless.
Have you read either of them? Both models in this thread are predictive models of situations that haven't happened yet. Both use real data (from the US and the UK). Neither can describe reality, so do we throw them both out? That leaves the GBD lot with no epidemiological support at all, which would make my point rather concisely.
We simply don't have enough information to know whether the GBD proposal is safe or, even if it was, whether it could be implemented, and it's all the more suspicious because its three proponents have been making very similar arguments against general lockdown since at least April, when we knew dramatically less. They do not seem to have changed their stances based on new information, which moves the GBD out of science and into politics. Only they're leaning on their academic credentials to lend it airs of legitimacy it can't back up, which makes it complete, utter bullshit that nobody should pay any attention to. It's preying on desperation and optimism to deepen social division and reinforce political hysteria at the worst possible time. No credible health authority is paying any attention to it, nor should they. Please don't bring that sort of content to HN.
