I’d like to respond to a small piece of this: if a large fraction of the population is naturally immune, how are superspreader events possible?
This is not surprising. It’s possible both that a large fraction of the population is immune, and that occasional events happen to include no or very few naturally immune people—just as flipping a fair coin will sometimes result in an unusual HHHHHHHHHH sequence. If superspreader events were the norm, they would be some evidence against natural immunity—but people mostly seem to cite the same few superspreader events, suggesting that very few social gatherings are superspreader scenarios.
I did not compute the odds precisely before writing up that section.
The two cases cited have attack rates of 53⁄61 and 104⁄122.
For a 25% cross immunity rate that would correspond to ~2% and .4% probability respectively.
For a 33% cross immunity rate that would correspond to a .02% and a .0001% probability respectively.
The actual claim of what percentage of the population is immune is fairly nebulous but anything beyond 25% would be hard to justify.
I’d like to respond to a small piece of this: if a large fraction of the population is naturally immune, how are superspreader events possible?
This is not surprising. It’s possible both that a large fraction of the population is immune, and that occasional events happen to include no or very few naturally immune people—just as flipping a fair coin will sometimes result in an unusual HHHHHHHHHH sequence. If superspreader events were the norm, they would be some evidence against natural immunity—but people mostly seem to cite the same few superspreader events, suggesting that very few social gatherings are superspreader scenarios.
I did not compute the odds precisely before writing up that section.
The two cases cited have attack rates of 53⁄61 and 104⁄122.
For a 25% cross immunity rate that would correspond to ~2% and .4% probability respectively. For a 33% cross immunity rate that would correspond to a .02% and a .0001% probability respectively.
The actual claim of what percentage of the population is immune is fairly nebulous but anything beyond 25% would be hard to justify.