Reposted from Dr. Judith Curry?s Climate Etc.

Posted on July 27, 2020 by niclewis

By Nic Lewis

I showed in my May 10th article Why herd immunity to COVID-19 is reached much earlier thanthought that inhomogeneity within a population in the susceptibility and in the social-connectivity related infectivity of individuals would reduce, in my view probably very substantially, the herd immunity threshold (HIT), beyond which an epidemic goes into retreat. I opined, based on my modelling, that the HIT probably lay somewhere between 7% and 24%, and that evidence from Stockholm County suggested it was around 17% there, and had been reached. Mounting evidence supports my reasoning.^[1]

I particularly want to highlight an important paper published on July 24th ?Herd immunity thresholds estimated from unfolding epidemics? (Aguas et al.).^[2] The author team is much the same as that of the earlier theoretical paper (Gomes et al.^[3])…