I haven't worn a mask all week. It's almost as if normalcy has returned.

https://covid19serohub.nih.gov/ here is a good source for seroprevalence data. I'm a physicist who knows enough about statistics and model-building to be dangerous :).

You're not a virologist or epidemiologist right?, you're providing a link to something (the same thing I did, from which you specifically asked for)?

I haven't worn a mask, unless it was indoors (and that was local mandates), since the beginning and also, masks weren't even available during the absolute height of the pandemic, when everybody (old people) was dying in New York.

A random suburban bar. Packed, with no masks.

And certainly some of those people were not vaccinated. Tsk tsk to them.

No, but it's not obvious to me that the guy you quoted is one either. If he has some more sophisticated model than A/B, I'd like to see it.


Anyway you have no reason to listen to me. I sent you a link to a good primary source of seroprevalence data, which you can use to form your own models and interpretation.

In my view, the highest number on there is highly incongruous with the claim in the video you posted. ere. This may also be because the data is biased in some way that is undercounting, but at least the seroprevalence is a direct observable and does not require too sophisticated an analysis (one can assume with such high values, the effects of false positives and false negatives are unlikely to be very important... you may remember how improper statistical accounting of false positive rates lead to wildly incorrect conclusions in the early Santa Clara County study).

There is also independent data from blood donations, which may also be biased, but is 20% as of March, broadly consistent with the NIH data above (it's cited, for example, here: https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/15/healt...ies/index.html, I'm not sure where the Red Cross publishes their reports).

Of course this is all from March, more people have been infected by now, but given the trajectory of COVID I'd guess it the total seroprevalence is unlikely to have increased by such a large factor.


Another handle is to use the number of estimated deaths. The population IFR is on the order of 0.5-1% (depending on the demographics of the population, naturally). Conservatively using that lower number and the number of deaths so far (600k), one gets approximately 120 million cases in the US. Of course some of these cases may have happened to the same person multiple times, but at face value, this gives us a prevalence estimate as of now of around 36%. This is higher than (admittedly rather stale) serology estimates, but it is using a low-ball number for population IFR, so I would consider this an approximate upper bound.


So I'd believe anywhere between 20-35% of Americans may have had COVID-19 right now, but 50% sounds implausible given the data.

You know what's weird to me, is the fact that you created and posted a reply to me within/under 9 minutes of a video that is 7 minutes long in which I didn't give you the exact timestamp.

I looked him up and found his argument elsewhere in a more efficient medium :)
(yeah,sorry I'm not going to add any views to Fox News).

You watched the video (sounds like no), so you looked him up, formulated a response?

You asked where I heard it from, I did my DD backtracked and told you where I heard it and then you decided not to watch the video I gave you to which you asked for?

San Francisco has entered Fauci’s “herd immunity” range with 70% of the population of all ages having received at least one dose and 59% fully vaccinated. Add in those with post-infection immunity and well above 70% should have some degree of immunity. So now we’ll see what happens (remember diagnosed cases lag infections by around 2 weeks).

The data I’ve seen indicated a wider range than that and are highly localized with LA, for example, being at the upper end of your range or even above it and the Bay Area probably below it.

yeah, and places like Vermont and Hawaii are virtually unscathed.

I always wore them indoors where and when required but as soon as the CDC changed their policies and businesses started to follow suit, my masks stay in car. My wife doesn't even wear hers anymore and she was more vigilant about them.

One thing I would like to see all businesses do is let patrons know if masks are required, or if masks are not required. Many businesses have explicitly said no masks are needed when you come in. I have not seen a business that still requires it. But some businesses don't say what they want. Letting people who don't want to wear masks, and letting people who still want or need to wear masks, what the policy is would be good moving forward so people know if they need to carry a mask with them, or if there will be crowds of maskless people.

The only place I've had to wear a mask in the last couple of weeks was at the barber today. My barber has been very leery of the vaccine, but he said he got his first dose of the Pfizer shot last week (FINALLY!). Fortunately, there was no griping about the mask wearing and everyone was compliant. The rest of the barbers are already vaccinated, so once he gets his second dose the mask requirement at the shop will end.

I have never cared what the CDC said. The CDC has been so wrong, inconsistent and illogical about so much to do with covid that I consider them unreliable. Among their first mistakes was lying about the usefuness of masks, telling the public they weren’t useful, the stupidity of which was made obvious by the fact that every medical professional in every ER everywhere was wearing one.

As of now, it is still true that 56.5% of the people you will meet randomly in Texas has not been vaccinated. If you have been, you have a huge degree of protection but not 100%. The odds are overwhelming you will be protected. But you have to really hate that mask to be unwilling to slap it on your face for a few minutes in a crowded store to add just that little bit of additional protection.

Interestingly, barber shops are one of the places it makes the most sense NOT to wear a mask if the barber and customer are both vaccinated. The shops are usually small with only a few customers present at one time and you spend most of your time in the chair which is well distanced from the other chairs and their occupants. But strangely, barber shops are often one of the last places allowed to open and relieved of mask requirements. This is the kind of bizarre rule-making that causes a loss of faith in the authorities.

IDK if its a Covid thing, but did anybody get their federal tax refund yet? I only got my state tax refund but IDK where the F my federal one is. I hope the clowns in the tax office aren't busy working from home watching the hub. :hell:

This is the latest I've ever filed my income taxes, which I did on May 15th---and I got my federal refund on May 24th, direct deposit, of course. I was actually surprised how fast it came, I thought it would be at least 3 weeks.

I haven't gotten my state refund yet.

EDIT: My mistake, I actually got my state refund on May 21st---I just logged onto my bank account and went through the deposits. Wow, that was fast!

My partner and I usually file our taxes early but this was a weird year. And with the extension to May, we waited until almost the very last day.