73% of Americans are already immune to Omicron. What is the point of restrictions?
the CDC has announced the end of the obligations of the masks from next week while the Biden administration is trying to convince the Americans to return to normal, even if not to gamble that little bit of support left.
As part of this normalization campaign, the Associated Press has made public the news that 73% of Americans are actually already immune to the omicron variant.
With declining hospitalizations and new cases, many hospitals and their staff are finally taking a break from the incessant stirring of the omicron wave, even as the average number of deaths per day remains stubbornly high.
A "Health Statistics" professor quoted by the AP said the model helped reassure them that humanity – or at least the United States – has turned the corner.
"We have changed," said Ali Mokdad, a professor of health metrics science at the University of Washington in Seattle. "We have been exposed to this virus and we know how to deal with it."
The fact is, as the AP pointed out, SARS-CoV-2 is no longer “novel”: “Two years ago it arrived in a country where no one had seen it before. The entire population – 330 million people – was immunologically unprepared, that is, susceptible to infection ”.
If the United States experiences another "summer wave", it should be far less deadly than the previous one.
But the coronavirus is no longer a novelty. Two years ago he arrived in a country where no one's immune system had ever seen him before. The entire population – 330 million people – was immunologically naive, that is, susceptible to infections.
"I am optimistic even if we have a surge in the summer, cases will increase, but no hospitalizations and deaths," said Mokdad, who works on the model of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, which calculated the figure of 73% for The Associated Press.
What is unclear is how much of this 73% represents the natural immunity caused by infections. And by the end of the omicron wave, Johns Hopkins researchers predict that 3/4 of all Americans will have been infected with the variant, regardless of their vaccination status. Of course, to suggest that these "natural" infections have had a major impact on the immunity of the population would be a grave violation of "science".
Scientists from Johns Hopkins University's Bloomberg School of Public Health estimate that about three out of four people in the United States will have been infected with omicron by the end of the surge.
"We know that's a huge percentage of the population," said Shaun Truelove, an epidemiologist and disease modeler at Johns Hopkins. "This varies greatly by location and in some areas we expect the number of infected to be closer to one in two."
This means that different regions or groups of people have different levels of protection and risks. In Virginia, disease modelers think of their population in terms of groups with varying levels of immunity.
Moving forward, a lot will depend on how the virus evolves and evolves, and what future variants look like. But one thing is certain: humanity is much more protected now than it was two years ago.
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The article 73% of Americans are already immune to Omicron. What is the point of restrictions? comes from ScenariEconomici.it .
This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/il-73-degli-americani-e-gia-immune-a-omicron-che-senso-hanno-le-restrizioni/ on Fri, 18 Feb 2022 20:58:11 +0000.